Top 750 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sociologists - Page 5

The world system is coming to the structural crisis

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

The importance of certain problems concerning the facts will be inherent in the structure of the system.

We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning.

The results indicate that heterogeneity of race and heterogeneity of family educational background can increase the achievement of children from weak educational backgrounds with no adverse effect on children from strong educational backgrounds.

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

If we refuse to accept as inevitable the irresponsibility and educational unconcern of the adolescent culture, then this poses a serious challenge.

In the early days of his reign, Bismarck confided to a friend that it would some day be necessary for Germany to confine William II in an insane asylum.

Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome.

When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.

At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

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.

We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.

The interruptions of the telephone seem to us to waste half the life of the ordinary American engaged in public or private business; he has seldom half an hour consecutively at his own disposal - a telephone is a veritable time scatterer.

It is, let me say, at the very least by no means self-evident that there is more liberty, equality, and fraternity in the world today than there was one thousand years ago. One might arguably suggest that the opposite is true. I seek to paint no idyll of the worlds before historical capitalism. They were worlds of little liberty, little equality, and little fraternity. The only question is whether historical capitalism represented progress in these regards, or regression.

We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.

Nature still obstinately refuses to co-operate by making the rich people innately superior to the poor people.

The part an actor played on stage was once written on a separate roll of paper.

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high.

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.

The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so--concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.

In a world of global dependencies with no corresponding global polity and few tools of global justice, the rich of the world are free to pursue their own interests while paying no attention to the rest.

But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

The great problem there is we have to have the cooperation of those other Asian countries.

There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evil-doer.

Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned.

Discretion is nothing other than the sense of justice with respect to the sphere of the intimate contents of life.

I didn't want to go into the papal bureaucracy, so I thought of doing a postdoctoral thesis, which they call a 'Habilitation' in German universities, on alchemy in the work of Albert the Great.

Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.

There is no true life within a false life.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences.

You need education. You need subsistence protection. We need jobs and social security. These are preconditions under which it will perhaps be possible to deal with these complex circumstances.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

If a person perceives a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.

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.

Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization.

Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.

Why do Americans find government so baffling and irritating-even though many of us depend on public programs for a secure retirement, an affordable mortgage, or a college loan? In this timely and important book, political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains how the United States has come to rely on hidden, indirect policies that privilege special interests but puzzle regular citizens. American democracy can do better, and she shows how. Politicians and the public alike have much to learn from her brilliant and engaging analysis.

Behind every rational and irrational force in human society there is a social mechanism which determines where it is to appear and what forms it is to take.

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

And it also became clear that these conditions of inequality and historical injustice have given rise to a feeling of hate in the world - a deeply felt hate that cannot easily be overcome with a few good words.

One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.

Total falsehoods can be easily exposed for what they are by citing exceptions to their claims. Hence, they are less likely to be accepted as the total truth.

There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.

Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record.

Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

Our culture is at a critical cusp - a time that requires that we define what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. Within our nation we need to foster a greater sense of collective responsibility.

People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.

If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble - and will not publish with a clear conscience.

But in action, one defies one's character.

Demography is destiny.

If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.

The ethical regime [of the Jews] was quite definitely Ptolemaic, revolving around the small group of Jews, not the larger Gentile group and, accordingly, they learned to remain unimpressed by Gentile temporal power. Being unimpressed did not mean being unafraid material power might beat or starve one to death; it did mean refusing to surrender moral hegemony to the majority merely because it had power.

Back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered.