Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American sociologist Robert Staughton Lynd.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Robert Staughton Lynd was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, New York City. He is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with his wife, Helen Lynd; as the coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929) and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1937); and a pioneer in the use of social surveys. He was also the author of Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture (1939). In addition to writing and research, Lynd taught at Columbia from 1931 to 1960. He also served on U.S government committees and advisory boards, including President Herbert Hoover's Research Committee on Social Trends and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Consumers' Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration. Lynd was also a member of several scientific societies.
Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve.
There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evil-doer.
Friendship will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long.
I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear.
Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The things that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them.
Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with.
One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.
Most of us can remember a time when a birthday - especially if it was one's own - brightened the world as if a second sun has risen.
Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.
[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.
Friendship is not going to stand the pressure of greatly great guidance for quite extensive.
When the last Puritan has disappeared from the earth, the man of science will take his place as a killjoy, and we shall be given the same old advice but for different reasons.
The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances.