Quotes by Sociologists - Page 11

Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?
Gustave Le Bon
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
C. Wright Mills
They ought not to have let things come to this," he said, but he was never very clear even to himself who or why "They" were nor what "This" was. Some person or persons unknown was to blame. He hated these unknowns in general. But he was unable to focus his hatred into hating some responsible person or persons in particular. If only he could find who it was had neglected to do something, or had done something wrong or messed about with things, they would catch it. He'd get even with them somehow.
H.G.Wells
When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown back!...Since imagination is hungry for novelty, and ungoverned, it gropes at random
Émile Durkheim
From the structure of language comes the explanation of why the human spirit is condemned to an odyssey - why it first finds its way to itself only on a detour via a complete externalization in other things and in other humans. Only at the greatest distance from itself does it become conscious of itself in its irreplaceable singularity as an individuated being.
Jürgen Habermas
...isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all the advertising men who create it?
David Riesman
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Peace in patriarchy is war against women.
Maria Mies
I'd learned that the same internal voice that told me I wasn't good enough had a habit of judging other women, too. They fed into each other, so it was best to quell such thoughts before they gathered strength.
Kjerstin Gruys
[A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.
H.G.Wells
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Male experience is what patriarchal culture uses to represent human experience, even when it is women who most often live it.
Allan G. Johnson
We are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverseknowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanentconstruction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, socialexposure).
Lisa Adkins
[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Men and boys are constantly portrayed as predatory, sexist, their sense of humour is vilified and their behaviour is regarded as unacceptable. Factor in the constant diet we are fed of men as perpetrators of rape, murder and domestic violence. Boys must wonder whether they will ever be able to do anything right. This must make it painfully difficult for young men and women to build up relations based on honesty, love and trust.
Belinda Brown
Victimhood gives us great moral superiority and entitles us to unquestioning sympathy while exempting us from examining any single one of our actions. A victim is utterly devoid of responsibility or blame. This of course leaves us vulnerable as we will carry on engaging in precisely the behaviour which provoked an unacceptable response.
Belinda Brown
Normative statements about "women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being "appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as "naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour.
Rebecca M. Jordan-Young
And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Feminism is a movement for change, not a changing of the guard.
Finn Mackay
But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women.
Finn Mackay
Forget the myths you have heard about radical feminism, for only some of them are true. Instead, prepare to think about why so many lies are told about this particular brand of feminism, how it acts as a scapegoat for all that is most threatening about our social movement and how any revolutionary movement for change could really ever be anything but threatening. These are the women you were warned about; you can be too.
Finn Mackay
They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs MacAvelly suggested. "Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em– nor God– nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It wanted, — it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want.
H.G.Wells
Turning the safety argument on its head, we now propose that what women need in order to maximize their access to public space as citizens is not greater surveillance or protectionism (however well meaning), but the right to take risks.
Shilpa Phadke
If we are serious about change, we have to dig - preferably with plenty of company and with a full appreciation of the fact that although we did not start the fire, it belongs to us now.
Allan G. Johnson
The structural foundations of traditional manhood--economic independence, geographic mobility, domestic dominance--have all been eroding. The transformation of the workplace--the decline of the skilled worker, global corporate relocations, the malaise of the middle-class manager, the entry of women into the assembly line and the corporate office--have pressed men to confront their continued reliance on the marketplace as the way to demonstrate and prove their manhood.
Michael S. Kimmel
the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Its time we woke up,” pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. “Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but who’s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and what’s more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes - and shoes - which of us wants to dance with her?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Men who shared the load at home seemed just as pressed for time as their wives, and torn between the demands of career and small children...But the majority of men did not share the load at home. Some refused outright. Others refused more passively, often offering a loving shoulder to lean on, an understanding ear as their working wife faced the conflict they both saw as hers.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.
Pierre Bourdieu
Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard
This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda "aligned" with the curricular content that first or second graders are expected to know. Like the common school movement, uniform indicators of quality, centralized regulation, more highly credientialed teachers are to ensure that instruction--rather than creating engaging activities for children to explore--will be delivered in more uniform ways. And the state signals to parents that this is now the appropriate way to raise one's three- or four-year-old. Modern child rearing is equated with systems building in the eyes of universal pre-kindergarten advocates--and parents hear this discourse through upbeat articles in daily newspapers, public service annoucement, and from school authorities.
Bruce Fuller
We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.
Harry Edwards
Porn is now so deeply embedded in our culture that it has become synonymous with sex to such a point that to criticize porn is to get slapped with the label anti-sex.…But what if you are a feminist who is pro-sex in the real sense of the word, pro that wonderful, fun, and deliciously creative force that bathes the body in delight and pleasure, and what you are actually against is porn sex? A kind of sex that is debased, dehumanized, formulaic, and generic, a kind of sex not based on individual fantasy, play, or imagination, but one that is the result of an industrial product created by those who get excited not by bodily contact but by market penetration and profits? Where, then, do you fit in the pro-sex, anti-sex dichotomy when pro-porn equals pro-sex?
Gail Dines
Pornography is to sex what McDonalds is to food. A plasticized, generic version of the real thing.
Gail Dines
Sex has to do with your physical body, while gender has to do with your social expression of a range of masculinities and/or femininities (and/or neutralities).
Chauntelle Tibbals
Sociaty is made up of a vast array of communities and experiences and though you don't have to like them all, all of them are significant pieces comprising the whole of humanity. As such, all of them are worthy of respectful consideration.
Chauntelle Tibbals
In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms, one must rid oneself of the idea that all happiness derives from nature, and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the contrary, games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness born of rules, and a force that comes from ceremony, and not desire.
Jean Baudrillard
When a small night-lamp alone illuminated our love-making, it became a very small, circular room which silently passed through nights humming with stars.
Fernand Dumont
Aspire to be who you most admire
Deborah A. Carr
Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.
H.G.Wells
What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced
Jean Baudrillard
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have.
Jean Baudrillard
it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.
Jean Baudrillard
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
Jean Baudrillard
it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
Jean Baudrillard
It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
Jean Baudrillard
There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard.
H.G.Wells
When you are in trouble, you need to put all your energies into thinking that there is a way out. Then, the bottom, the dark hole, becomes just a springboard from which you can leap so high that your head might hit a cloud.
Fatema Mernissi
Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat.
H.G.Wells
Tewler Americanus in particular was irritated by a harsh logic that overrode his dearest belief in his practical isolation, whenever he chose to withdraw himself, from the affairs of the rest of the world. He had escaped from the old world and he hated to feel that he was being drawn back to share a common destiny with the rest of mankind.
H.G.Wells
This sense of insecurity was falling about the entire planet and though people went on doing the things they usually did, they had none of the assurance, the happy-go-lucky "all-right" feeling, that had hitherto sustained normal men. They went on doing their customary things because they could not think of anything else to do. They tried to believe, and many did succeed in believing, that there would presently be a turn for the better. They did nothing to bring about that turn for the better; they just hoped it would occur.
H.G.Wells
Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.
C. Wright Mills
Power, it seems, is one of those terms we all understand and can explain--until asked to do so.
Martin N. Marger
P6-the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within sociey.
C. Wright Mills