Quotes by Sociologists

To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
If the system were designed to protect adoptees, why do so many have to fight for their rights?
DaShanne Stokes
Don’t be a witness. Be an activist.
DaShanne Stokes
Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other.
H.G.Wells
Nowhere in the world, Rud reflected, was journalism anything but a malignant and wanton power. Later on, as the Common-sense Movement grew, he had to think a lot about that. He had to spread a new system of ideas throughout the world, and journalism would neither instruct nor inform nor lend itself consistently to any sustained propaganda.
H.G.Wells
A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time
Patrick Geddes
The 'teenager' seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
When white-collar people get jobs they sell not only their time and energy but their personalities as well. They sell by week or month their smiles and their kindly gestures and they must practise prompt repression of resentment and aggression.
C. Wright Mills
A soul occupied with great ideas performs small duties.
Harriet Martineau
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
H.G.Wells
You had better live your best and act your best and think your best today for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.
Harriet Martineau
Respect the past in the full measure of its deserts but do not make the mistake of confusing it with the present nor seek in it the ideals of the future.
Jose Ingenieros
The past is but the beginning of a beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G.Wells
The future is the shape of things to come.
H.G.Wells
A talent somewhat above mediocrity shrewd and not too sensitive is more likely to rise in the world than genius which is apt to be perturbable and to wear itself out before fruition.
Charles Horton Cooley
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community it is necessary to come up to a certain somewhat indefinite conventional standard of wealth.
Thorstein Veblen
All Socialism involves slavery.
Herbert Spencer
In combat life is short nasty and brutish. The issues of national policy which brought him into war are irrelevant to the combat soldier he is concerned with his literal life chances.
Charles E. Moskos
He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.
William Graham Sumner
Who is apt on occasion to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.
Harriet Martineau
Cuteness in children is totally an adult perspective. The children themselves are unaware that the quality exists let alone its desirability until the reactions of grown-ups inform them.
Leontine Young
Science is organized knowledge.
Herbert Spencer
He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.
H.G.Wells
Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.
Helen Merrell Lynd
Men are created different they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
David Riesman
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H.G.Wells
Don't quote me that's what you heard not what I said.
Lawrence K. Frank
What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.
Beatrice Potter Webb
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
H.G.Wells
Time is that which man is always trying to kill but which ends in killing him.
Herbert Spencer
The highest value in life is found in the stewardship of time.
Robert M. Fine
People can bear anything.
Philip Slater
It's not worthy of human beings to give up.
Alva Reimer Myrdal
Born in inquity and conceived in sin the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
Thorstein Veblen
Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.
Helen Merrell Lynd
Men are created different they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
David Riesman
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H.G.Wells
In combat life is short nasty and brutish. The issues of national policy which brought him into war are irrelevant to the combat soldier he is concerned with his literal life chances.
Charles E. Moskos
Don't quote me that's what you heard not what I said.
Lawrence K. Frank
What we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.
Beatrice Potter Webb
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
H.G.Wells
Time is that which man is always trying to kill but which ends in killing him.
Herbert Spencer
The highest value in life is found in the stewardship of time.
Robert M. Fine
People can bear anything.
Philip Slater
It's not worthy of human beings to give up.
Alva Reimer Myrdal
Born in inquity and conceived in sin the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
Thorstein Veblen
Moral indignation - jealousy with a halo.
H.G.Wells
Disease often tells its secrets in a casual parenthesis.
Wilfred Trotter
Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.
Lewis Mumford
Life is the only art that we are required to practise without preparation and without being allowed the preliminary trials the failures and botches that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.
Lewis Mumford
Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power The world must follow you!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Lewis Mumford
Our true nationality is mankind.
H.G.Wells
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.
Harriet Martineau
To be honest one must be inconsistent.
H.G.Wells
The forgotten man. He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of outside his little circle. ... He works he votes generally he prays but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner