Best 300 quotes in «sociology quotes» category

The older the friendship, the stronger the trust.

...the only way out consists of using a social mask. This is why those under depression will smile more as well as make efforts to please and entertain compared to anyone else. ... If they could hide in public, and they do hide in other ways, both psychological and physical. The psychological feeling of being trapped comes afterwards from the need to have social life, and that's when the anti-social personality starts developing furthermore.

Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

The people who overcome their fears are the ones who can achieve their dreams.

The problem with capitalism is that "we have a global theology without morality, without a Bible." And that's dangerous, he warns - "we're not going to be able to exist in a global context if we are the bastards of our business.

The racial conflict and self-segregation described [...] are not what we would expect if widespread assumptions about the advantages of diversity are true. The prevailing view in the media and some parts of academia is that race is not even a legitimate biological category, and that it is only because of prejudiced conditioning that we even notice it. This view ignores the large body of scientific work that suggests racial and ethnic consciousness is deeply rooted in human psychology. Our species seems to have an instinct for determining who is in our group and who is not. Studies of individuals point to unconscious processes in the brain that reflect a suspicion of people unlike ourselves, leading some researchers to conclude that ethnocentrism is part of human nature. At the same time, studies at the group level show that ethnic conflict is universal. In all countries, diversity of religion, ethnicity, or race causes conflict. For the better part of the post-war period, sociologists and political scientists downplayed ethnic conflict, on the assumption that it was a pre modern relic that would be replaced by competition based on class or professional affiliation. This has not happened. As one researcher has concluded, “ethnicity based on common descent tends to be more important than class based on common interest. Blood runs thicker than money.” It is from two directions, therefore, that scientists have begun to question the view that ethnic or racial mixing can be easily achieved. Laboratory investigations of individuals have found what may be tribal or ethnocentric instincts, while analysis of societies suggests that diversity invariably brings conflict.

The real enemy" is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real enemy is not an object apart from life. It is the organization of life by powers detached from it and turned against it. The apparatus, not its personnel, is the real enemy. But it is by and through the apparatchiks and everyone else participating in the system that domination and deception are made manifest. The totality is the organization of all against each and each against all. It includes all the policemen, all the social workers, all the office workers, all the nuns, all the op-ed columnists, all the drug kingpins from Medellin to Upjohn, all the syndicalists and all the situationists.

Therapy entails the conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay within the institutionalized definitions of reality, or, in other words, to prevent "inhabitants" of a given universe from "emigrating". It does this by applying the legitimating apparatus to individual "cases". Since ever society faces the danger of individual deviance, we may assume that therapy in one form or another is a global social phenomena. Its specific institutional arrangements, from exorcism to psycho-analysis, from pastoral care to personal counseling programmes, belong, of course, under the category of social control. [...] Since therapy must concern itself with deviations from the "official" definition of reality, it must develop a machinery to account for such deviations and to maintain the realities thus challenged. This requires a body of knowledge that include a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls".

There are a lot of people who do not care about public interest. In fact, they always cater to their own self-interests.

There are people who ask others how to do something, not with the intention to learn, but so that others do it instead of them.

There are risks in overstating individuals' freedoms and responsibilities, and then assuming they can and should shape their own lives, and bear all the blame when they fail. This model denies great inequalities in people's skill, knowledge, status and resources.

There is a huge difference between thinking we know something and actually knowing something.

There can be no spirituality, according to the Sufi masters, without psychology, psychological insight and sociological balance.

There is so much you don't know about a person. I wonder if I could've made her days a little bit easier, if I'd tried. If I'd treated her a little nicer. Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.

There is a simple rule regarding wisdom: those who have a superficial knowledge cannot be wise. On the contrary, wise people have broad knowledge. However, besides the acquired knowledge, wisdom arises from observation and contemplation over a longer period of time. Wisdom is, therefore, often the privilege of older people who have a broad knowledge and respectable experience. Feel free to ask such people for advice.

There's nothing wrong with giving up all your principles for a suitable financial reward. It is indeed the basis of our society.

There's no reason to assume that all men are bad. Not even all the soldiers are monsters.

There’s no reason to cry over spilled milk. People cannot change the things that have already happened.

The unstated premise that nature is nice lies behind many of the objections to the Darwinian theory of human sexuality. Carefree sex is natural and good, it is assumed, so if someone claims that men want it more than women do, it would imply that men are mentally healthy and women neurotic and repressed. That conclusion is unacceptable, so the claim that men want carefree sex more than women do cannot be correct. Similarly, sexual desire is good, so if men rape for sex (rather than to express anger towards women), rape would not be as evil. Rape is evil; therefore the claim that men rape for sex cannot be correct. More generally, what people instinctively like is good, so if people like beauty, beauty would be a sign of worth. Beauty is not a sign of worth, so the claim that people like beauty cannot be correct. These kinds of arguments combine bad biology (nature is nice), bad psychology (the mind is created by society), and bad ethics (what people like is good). Feminism would lose nothing by giving them up.

[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete life to a universe of speculation.

The sportification process of bodily practices of certain society, generates new physical manifestations, essentially different, which will help in another process: the indoctrination of subjects with capital values. And this process happens in the dark, without people having consciousness of it.

The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.

The social phenomenon of economic growth is, thanks to the principle of the conservation of matter, nothing other than the physical phenomenon of increasing resource depletion.

The strictest judges are ignorant people.

The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories.

The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.

The wind considers how trauma is - in essence - just a memory that violates previous memories too barbarically, an event that devastatingly conflicts against everything else one knows.

This is how all social, ideological, or religious movements police their members-by making clear that agreement will be rewarded with greater social standing and support, and dis-agreement punished with ostracism.

They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is still the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety-

Those who have no knowledge are often willing to occupy influential positions with the aim of acquiring every possible benefit.

Those who help promptly help the most.

Those who do not complicate life choose the easiest way to achieve happiness.

To have autonomy without interdependency leads to isolation or narcissism. To have interdependency with no autonomy stunts our psychological growth. Healthy people live in social groups that have learned to balance or, better, marry these two imperatives.

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.

Throughout the history of the Kensington Rune Stone in the twentieth century, memories of an ancient battle were repeatedly evoked to address the concerns about more recent battles. The skræling endured as a convenient symbol of the threats posed by secularization, urbanization, and diversification. As sociologist Richard K. Fenn observes, “Any society is a reservoir of old longings and ancient hatreds. These need to be understood, addressed, resolved and transcended if a society is to have a future that is different from its past.” Furthermore, when a society does not adequately confront its past, it perpetually finds “a new target that resembles but also differs from the source of original conflict.” If Fenn is correct, old enemies will continue to emerge in the face of new enemies unless Minnesotans can understand, address, resolve, and transcend the state’s original sin: the unjust treatment of the region’s first inhabitants.

Time is the unbiased judge of all ideas.

True friendship doesn't include jealousy.

To the degree its ephemeral, the social photo does the opposite: it interrupts the traditional photographic mode of fixing the present as impending history, positing instead a captured moment that is indifferent to such recording.

Topography defines place and the human situation therein.

Trump is a broken toilet, and we wish the old bog plumbing problems.

Trying to take away someone’s language is usually the first step in trying to change them.

Truth travels by bike, rumors travel by plane.

Typ oświecenia, jaki socjologia ma do zaoferowania, jest adresowany do jednostek kierujących się wolną wolą i ma na względzie powiększenie oraz umocnienie ich wolności wyboru. Jego bezpośrednim celem jest powrót do pozornie zamkniętej kwestii wyjaśniania, a poprzez to - promowanie zrozumienia. Socjologiczne wyjaśnienie może dodać energii, racjonalności i skuteczności ludzkiej autokreacji i samostanowieniu, owym warunkom wstępnym ludzkiej zdolności decydowania o tym, czy istotnie pragnie się żyć tak, jak żyć, z nieodwołanego ponoć wyroku losu, wypada. Autonomia społeczeństwa zyskuje na autonomii jednostki; społeczeństwa i jednostki mogą tylko sprawę swej autonomii razem wygrać lub razem przegrać.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.

Use two-way communication on oral exams to check the students' knowledge, not their attitudes. Checking attitudes can lead to the slippery area of subjective assessment.

Unfortunately, people who always tell the truth don't have many friends.

Us" versus "them" is not in our genes. It is something we learn.

Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.