Quotes by Sociologists - Page 2

Human history is in essence a history of ideas.
H.G.Wells
Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford
One of the sources of pride in being a human being is the ability to bear present frustrations in the interests of longer purposes.
Helen Merrell Lynd
It is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise.
David Riesman
Who is the Forgotten Man? He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle.
William Graham Sumner
Those who love the young best stay young longer.
Edgar Friedenberg
The last step in parental love involves the release of the beloved the willing cutting of the cord that would otherwise keep the child in a state of emotional dependence.
Lewis Mumford
Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
Charles Horton Cooley
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Charles Horton Cooley
If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room full of people I would say to myself "You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation. ... Why should you be frightened?"
Beatrice Potter Webb
The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
H.G.Wells
A wiser rule would be to make up your mind soberly what you want peace or war and then to get ready for what you want for what we prepare for is what we shall get.
William Graham Sumner
Life is the only art that we are required to practice 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
Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh ... to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Charles Horton Cooley
Human life consists in mutual service. No grief pain misfortune or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Cynicism is humour in ill health.
H.G.Wells
It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time and a fairly romantic nature to want to.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
Thorstein Veblen
Juvenile appraisals of other juveniles make up in clarity what they lack in charity.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.
Herbert Spencer
The healthy being craves an occasional wildness a jolt from normality a sharpening of the edge of appetite his own little festival of the Saturnalia a brief excursion from his way of life.
Robert Maclver
All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage.
Thorstein Veblen
Three-quarters of a soldier's life is spent in aimlessly waiting about.
Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy
The fact of knowing how to read is nothing the whole point is knowing what to read.
Jacques Ellul
The artist has a special task and duty the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.
Lewis Mumford
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
Lewis Mumford
Part of the American dream is to live long and die young.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Advertising is legalized lying.
H.G.Wells
Buy me and you will overcome the anxieties I have just reminded you of.
Michael Schudson
Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them and know it but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.
William Graham Sumner
Adapt or perish now as ever is nature's inexorable imperative.
H.G.Wells
This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.
Lewis Mumford
Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a 'collateral victim' of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other.
Zygmunt Bauman
Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau- and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me.
H.G.Wells
Adoptee rights are everyone's rights, and they deserve to be protected.
DaShanne Stokes
Against an economism void of values other than those of exchange, protest stood for reuniting the festival and daily life, for transforming daily life into a site of desire and pleasure. The protesters were protesting against the fact, simultaneously obvious and ignored, that delight and joy, pleasure and desire, desert a society that is content with satisfaction—that is to say, catalogued, created needs that procure some particular object and evaporate in it.
Henri Lefebvre
Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.
Gwen Sharp
... Whenever the man of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.
Max Weber
If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.
Jacques Ellul
To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented.
Zygmunt Bauman
We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom. And in this same act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline
Peter Berger
In our society, defecation involves anindividual in activity which is defined as inconsistent withthe cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of ourperformances. Such activity also causes the individual todisarrange his clothing and to 'go out of play," that is, todrop from his face the expressive mask that he employs inface-to-face interaction. At the same time ic becomes difficultfor him to reassemble his personal front should the need toenter into interaction suddenly occur. Perhaps that is areason why toilet doors in our society have locks on them.
Erving Goffman
The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
C. Wright Mills
It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.
Émile Durkheim
I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.
Charles Horton Cooley
People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.
C. Wright Mills
Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.
Zygmunt Bauman
Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians?
Peter Berger
Lefebvre summarises this march of clock-time through society and nature (1991: 95–6). He argues that the lived time experienced in and through nature has gradually disappeared. Time is no longer something that is visible and inscribed within space. It has been replaced by measuring instruments, clocks, which are separate from natural and social space. Time becomes a resource, differentiated off from social space. It is consumed, deployed and exhausted. There is the expulsion of lived (and kairological) time as ‘clock-time’ dominates. Lefebvre describes this changing nature of time in terms of metaphor. In pre-modern societies lived time is encrypted into space as in a tree-trunk, and like a tree-trunk shows the mark of those years that it has taken to grow. While in modern societies time is absorbed into the city such that lived time is invisible or reduced to its methods of measurement. Lived time ‘has been murdered bysociety’ (Lefebvre 1991: 96).
John Urry
What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.
H.G.Wells
Perhaps the difference between a professor and a bus driver is that the professor can say stupid things with complete authority while the bus driver is not authorized to make brilliant insights.
Les Back
We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?
H.G.Wells
Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.
C. Wright Mills
So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.
Stanislav Andreski
We live in a 'two-hundred-year present'.
John Paul Lederach
The north of peacebuilding is best articulated as finding our way toward becoming and being local and global human communities characterized by respect, dignity, fairness, cooperation, and the nonviolent resolution of conflict. To understand this north, to read such a compass, requires that we recognize and develop our moral imagination far more intentionally.
John Paul Lederach
Nobody read books, but women, parsons and idle people.
H.G.Wells
In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun.
H.G.Wells
Dignity is to have a dream, a strong one, which gives you a vision, a world where you have a place, where whatever it is you have to contribute makes a difference.
Fatema Mernissi