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Quotes by Sociologist
"Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals."
37
"I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction."
37
"The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period."
37
"Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression."
37
"All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best."
37
"Among those who are satisfactory in this respect it is desirable to have represented as great a diversity of intellectual tradition, social milieu and personal character as possible."
37
"The conception that, instead of this, contemporary society is at or near a turning point is very prominent in the views of a school of social scientists who, though they are still comparatively few, are getting more and more of a hearing."
37
"Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems."
Fact,
37
"To win power anywhere you have to convince people that you can do something for them."
36
"In my opinion, fun is what makes advertising successful."
36
"Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."
36
"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding."
36
"The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship."
36
"The West hasn't reached its universal state as yet, although its close to it, but it certainly has evolved out of its warring state phase, which it was in for a couple of centuries."
36
"Well, I think the United States first of all has to recognize the world for what it is."
36
"The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth."
36
"Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others."
35
"Children from a given family background, when put in schools of different social compositions, will achieve at quite different levels."
35
"Acceptance of the power of God in one's life lays the groundwork for personal commitment to both science and Christianity, which so often have been in conflict."
35
"Moreover, broad plans commensurate with our national purpose and resources would bring conviction of our power to every soldier in the front line, to the nations associated with us in the war, and to the enemy."
35
"Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life."
35
"As an example, one of the schools I have been studying is too small to compete effectively in most sports, but participates with vigor each year in the state music contests."
35
"When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves."
35
"I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society."
35
"The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened."
35
"There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake."
35
"The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf."
35
"We also thought of ourselves in racial and largely ethnic terms."
35
"Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions."
34
"A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks."
34
"The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion."
34
"A child's learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher."
34
"We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?"
34
"Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam."
34
"Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history."
34
"Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism."
33
"There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life."
33
"I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties."
33
"Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon."
33
"The present structure of rewards in high schools produces a response on the part of an adolescent social system which effectively impedes the process of education."
33
"So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency."
33
"There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn't bother to change while there are women like that around."
32
"However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home."
32
"In a high school, the norms act to hold down the achievements of those who are above average, so that the school's demands will be at a level easily maintained by the majority."
32
"One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category."
31
"If love means that one person absorbs the other, then no real relationship exists any more. Love evaporates; there is nothing left to love. The integrity of self is gone."
31
"The educational resources provided by a child's fellow students are more important for his achievement than are the resources provided by the school board."
30
"Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty."
30
"Demands for equality for women are threats to men's self-esteem and sense of sexual turf."
30
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