Pitirim Sorokin Quotes

Are there quantitative aspects to the phenomena of war that can be counted? Evidently!

The most effective and most accessible way to acquire the maximum of constructive power is to love truly and wisely.

Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.

Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

The fine arts are one of the most sensitive mirrors of society and culture of which they are an important part. What society and culture are, such will their fine arts be. If the culture is predominantly sensate, sensate also will be its dominant fine arts. If the culture is unintegrated, chaotic and eclectic also will be its fine arts. Since contemporary Western culture is predominantly sensate, and since the crisis consists in the disintegration of its dominant supersystem, so the contemporary crisis in the fine arts must also exhibit a desintegration of the sensate form of our painting and sculpture, music, literature, drama and architecture.

The communists and fascists in politics are the analogues of the modernists in the fine arts. Both groups are in rebellion against the dominant sensate politico-economic and art systems; but both are essentially sensate. Accordingly, neither group can consitute the politico-economic or art system of the future. They are mainly destroyers and rebels – not constructive builders. They flourish only under the conditions peculiar to a period of transition. Being charged with destructive force, the modernists are too chaotic and distorted to serve as the bearers of a permanent art culture.

Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.

Love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity.

The resort to human flesh, often after months of ever-increasing hunger pangs, appeared to be an animallike reaction without painful emotional overtones.

[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe.