Quotes by Sociologists - Page 10

Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.
Jean Baudrillard
Talk without the support of action means nothing.
DaShanne Stokes
Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.
Jürgen Habermas
One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.
Émile Durkheim
Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world.
H.G.Wells
What's the best way to make sure that the poor have a share in a country's growing wealth: Regulation? Taxes? Philanthropy?
Linsey McGoey
...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Max Weber
The only true thoughts are those which do not grasp their own meaning
Theodor W. Adorno
If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time he or she was shocked.
H.G.Wells
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.
H.G.Wells
What we seek in travel is neither discovery nor trade but rather a gentle deterritorialization: we want to be taken over by the journey - in other words, by absence. As our metal vectors transcend meridians, oceans and poles, absence takes on a fleshy quality. The clandestineness of the depths of private life gives way to annihilation by longitude and latitude. But in the end the body tires of not knowing where it is, even if the mind finds this absence exalting, as if it were a quality proper to itself.Perhaps, after all, what we seek in others is the same gentle deterritorialization that we seek in travel. Instead of one's own desire, instead of discovery, we are tempted by exile in the desire of the other, or by the desire of the other as an ocean to cross. The looks and gestures of lovers already have the distance of exile about them; the language of lovers is an expatriation in words that are afraid to signify; and the bodies of lovers are a tender hologram to eye and hand, offering no resistance and hence susceptible of being crisscrossed, like airspace, by desire. We move around with circumspection on a mental planet of circumvolutions, and from our excesses and passions we bring back the same transparent memories as we do from our travels.
Jean Baudrillard
To get away from one's working environment is; in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.
Charles Horton Cooley
Jesus never says to the poor: ‘come find the church’, but he says to those of us in the church: ‘go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.
Tony Campolo
We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.
George Konrád
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.
Herbert Marcuse
We are but phantoms, and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights - so be it! But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together!
H.G.Wells
Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.
Jean Baudrillard
There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land
Harriet Martineau
Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is 'dehumanized', the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.
Max Weber
Advertising is legalized lying.
H.G.Wells
He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.("Pollock And The Porrah Man")
H.G.Wells
We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be.
H.G.Wells
The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.
Herbert Marcuse
…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination
H.G.Wells
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.
Jean Baudrillard
Uncoupling is a dramatic life event, whose importance is reflected in the eagerness of people to discuss their relationships even years later. Indeed, in attempting to put the story in chronological order, there was no one who was not visited again by sorrow and loss in the telling of it, regardless of the passage of time.
Diane Vaughan
Mourning is essential to uncoupling, as it is to any significant leavetaking. Uncoupling is a transition into a different lifestyle, a change of life course which, whether we recognize and admit it in the early phases or not, is going to be made without the other person. We commit ourselves to relationships expecting them to last, however. In leaving behind a significant person who shares a portion of our life, we experience a loss.
Diane Vaughan
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.
Zygmunt Bauman
Why do people always expect you to trust them? With all the shit that goes on in this world, I don't know why anyone expects my trust just because they are unverifiably, according to themselves, a nice guy. Who the hell defaults to trust?
Malka Older
The history of mankind," said Dreed, "has been a history of betrayals, the perennial betrayal of the common man by the men he has trusted.""By the men the lazy, haphazard, childish oaf was too wilfully stupid to mistrust," said Bodisham. "The history of mankind from the very beginning has been a history of over-trusted trustees, corrupted by their unchecked opportunities.
H.G.Wells
A certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming as necessary for everyone living in this world of today as reading and writing.
H.G.Wells
Prejudice is learned. What will you teach others through your actions and words?
DaShanne Stokes
Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of creation. It makes history possible.
Jacques Ellul
John says I musn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned" - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.
Jean Baudrillard
One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.
Matthew Desmond
ME/CFS is not synonymous with depression or other psychiatric ill- nesses. The belief by some that they are the same has caused much con- fusion in the past, and inappropriate treatment.Nonpsychotic depression (major depression and dysthymia), anxiety disorders and somatization disorders are not diagnostically exclusionary, but may cause significant symptom overlap. Careful attention to the timing and correlation of symptoms, and a search for those characteris- tics of the symptoms that help to differentiate between diagnoses may be informative, e.g., exercise will tend to ameliorate depression whereas excessive exercise tends to have an adverse effect on ME/CFS patients.
Bruce M. Carruthers
In general, fatigue is not as severe in depression as in ME/CFS. Joint and muscle pains, recurrent sore throats, tender lymph nodes, various cardiopulmonary symptoms (55), pressure headaches, prolonged post-exertional fatigue, chronic orthostatic intolerance, tachycardia, irritable bowel syndrome, bladder dysfunction, sinus and upper respiratory infections, new sensitivities to food, medications and chemicals, and atopy, new premenstrual syndrome, and sudden onset are commonly seen in ME/CFS, but not in depression. ME/CFS patients have a different immunological profile (56), and are more likely to have a down- regulation of the pituitary/adrenal axis (57). Anhedonia and self- reproach symptoms are not commonly seen in ME/CFS unless a concomitant depression is also present (58). The poor concentra- tion found in depression is not associated with a cluster of other cognitive impairments, as is common in ME/CFS. EEG brain mapping (59,60) and levels of low molecular weight RNase L (21,26) clearly distinguish ME/CFS from depression.
Bruce M. Carruthers
Bigotry lives not just in our words, but in our actions, thoughts, and institutions.
DaShanne Stokes
Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey. The traveler in space or time is an explorer who happens upon utopia. He (or, more recently, she) meets its people, usually at first its ordinary people, observes them at work and play, sees their dwellings and their cities... The traveler is, as are we, the more prepared to accept the validity and desirability of the general principles for having seen with his own eyes its effects in the daily life of its inhabitants.
Krishan Kumar
Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society.
Krishan Kumar
When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature
Tzvetan Todorov
Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss][Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion.
Gerhard Falk
My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.
H.G.Wells
It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.
H.G.Wells
To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted
George Keller
Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Max Weber
It's chance, I tell you,' he interrupted, ' as everything is in a man's life.
H.G.Wells
P.T.S.D. doesn't make you weak. It makes you a survivor.
DaShanne Stokes
Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
Émile Durkheim
But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Society reproduces itself antagonistically.
Rudolf J. Siebert
Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.
Philip Rieff
With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.
H.G.Wells
Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.
Émile Durkheim
We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
Émile Durkheim
Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.
Thomas J. Scheff