Top 750 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Sociologists - Page 7

That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set.

I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear.

There's not much need for prophets who are in synch with their society.

As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.

There is a tendency to want to treat blacks as a monolithic socioeconomic group.

In every school, more boys wanted to be remembered as a star athlete than as a brilliant student.

Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.

The second reason why we haven't observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the 'middle classes' - that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly 'middle' segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent).

The main concern of the study is with the outline of a theoretical system. Its minor variations from writer to writer are not a matter of concern to this analysis.

I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen.

Are there still other possibilities? Of course there are. What is important to recognize is that all three historical options are really there, and the choice will depend on our collective world behavior over the next fifty years. Whichever option is chosen, it will not be the end of history, but in a real sense its beginning. The human social world is still very young in cosmological time. In 2050 or 2100, when we look back at capitalist civilization, what will we think?

That was the first major social sciences conference at which social scientists from all cultures wanted to reach a consensus on whether we can continue to pursue a national course in the social sciences or whether we need a cosmopolitan path that also connects us in a new way.

We live in a globalising world. That means that all of us, consciously or not, depend on each other. Whatever we do or refrain from doing affects the lives of people who live in places we'll never visit.

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.

Partnerships are increasingly seen through the prism of promises and expectations, and as a kind of product for consumers: satisfaction on the spot, and if not fully satisfied, return the product to the shop or replace it with a new and improved one! You don't, after all, stick to your car, or computer, or iPod, when better ones appear.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.

The eventual place the American army should take on the western front was to a large extent influenced by the vital question of communication and supply.

Teachers need to teach the subject rather than to teach the textbook.

The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances.

You could say that we are living in an internally globalized country.

The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.

The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.

The dead govern the living.

Happiness needs one-upmanship.

Equal pay for equal work continues to be seen as applying to equal pay for men and women in the same occupation, while the larger point of continuing relevance in our day is that some occupations have depressed wages because women are the chief employee. The former is a pattern of sex discrimination, the latter of institutionalized sexism.

Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students.

The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life - involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory in this sense.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons.

The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took.

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.

Education in the past has been too much inspiration and too little information.

The layout of textbooks, I think, has been done with an assumption that students don't read.

Many African-American men are incarcerated. And so African-American women do carry an enormous burden. And traditionally have carried a greater burden than perhaps their white counterparts.

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic.

Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.

Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.

Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.

A woman who places a high priority on performance and excellence is seen as imperial. A man is seen as demanding and tough.

Liberals were intimidated by the Reagan administration and did not want to appear naive by talking about programs that called for government support. I just said, 'The hell with that. I'm out there.'

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.

Scientific modes of thought cannot be developed and become generally accepted unless people renounce their primary, unreflecting, and spontaneous attempt to understand all their experience in terms of its purpose and meaning for themselves. The development that led to more adequate knowledge and increasing control of nature was therefore, considered from one aspect, also a development toward greater self-control by men.

Mothers and daughters find in each other the source of great comfort but also of great pain. We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we talk to anyone else.

. . . if I had been a man, self-respect, family pressure and the public opinion of my class would have pushed me into a money-making profession; as a mere woman I could carve out a career of disinterested research.

History can be a weapon, and it can be used against you.

Poverty is a relationship that involves a lot of folks, rich and poor alike. I was looking for something that brought a lot of different people in a room. Eviction does that, embroils landlords and tenants, lawyers and social workers.

We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.

The deal is that women have entered the workforce, but they have not been relieved of the domestic responsibilities.

Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.

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.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.