Top 55 Sociologists Quotes & Sayings

If there's a distinction between men and women, I don't pay attention to it. Honestly, I don't see it. I think all of us are part feminine and part masculine. I'm sure sociologists can come up with distinctions about what's different between men and women, but for every example you can give about what a woman does, you can come up with an opposite example of other women who don't do that. Those are more artificial distinctions, I think.

These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge - a common understanding - likemindedness as the sociologists say.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization

There are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and astrophysicists, but many among psychologists, sociologists, and historians. The reason seems obvious: the first study divine design, the second study human undesign.

Controlling for all the things that sociologists, economists, and political scientists say you should control for, we find that what drives one's views [most significantly] is race.

Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: You become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.

As the popular trust in science fades - and many sociologists say that's happening today - people will develop a distrust of purely "scientific" psychology. Researchers in the universities haven't picked up on this; they're more interested in genetics and computer models of thinking than ever. But, in general, there is a huge distrust of the scientific establishment now.

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.

Comedians are sociologists. We're pointing out stuff that the general public doesn't even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists.

Teachers are expected to be teachers, psychiatrists, nurses, sociologists, psychologists, surrogate moms or dads, as the case may be.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.

Probably the only people left who think that economics deserves a Nobel Prize are economists. It confirms their conceit that they're doing 'science' rather than the less tidy task of observing the world and trying to make sense of it. This, after all, is done by mere historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and (heaven forbid) even journalists. Economists are loath to admit that they belong in such raffish company.

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.

Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.

I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.

We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry.

I'm pleased that some economists and sociologists are beginning to talk about, for example, alternative measures of human well-being - alternative, that is, to GDP, on which the world runs.

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation.

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.

One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption-rational utility maximization-that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists.

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists.

I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.

Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.

Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.

All the electronic devices are weakening the social bonds. Sociologists and psychologists should study this serious threat instead of repeating that communication is the cement of society.

Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we're working more. We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time.

Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline - sociology - as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals.

Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation.

A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes.

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction.

What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade

What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more pragmatic about the methods that we are using instead of pretending that we have our own scientific apparatus with very sophisticated mathematic models that distinguish us from sociologists and historians.

The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training.

In a way, all sociologists are akin to Marxists because of their inclination to settle everyone's accounts but their own.

Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus.

Sociologists almost uniformly report that increased gambling activities, which are promoted as sociologically 'acceptable' and which are made 'accessible' to larger numbers of people will increase the number of pathological gamblers

One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.

Sociologists say that going to the movies is a bonding experience. It probably has to do with the way you feet stick to the floor.

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions.

The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding.

I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a Camel will force children to become lifelong smokers.