Sociology Reinterpreted Quotes

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

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous. ~ Clifford Geertz

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to
live at all. ~ Ernest Becker

If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Society reproduces itself antagonistically. ~ Rudolf J. Siebert

Terry took the silence as acquiescence, "The other way to make money is to exploit people, oh, no sorry, that's the 'only' way to make money, exploit other people, that's how the billionaires have acquired all their money by exploiting others… So how did they achieve it? You're going to love this… they changed all the rules to accommodate what they wanted to do. How I hear you ask… easy, they own the politicians, they own the banks, they own industry and they own everything. They made it easier for themselves to invest in so called emerging markets. What once would've been considered treasonous was now considered virtuous. Instead of building up the nation state and its resources, all of its resources, including its people, they concentrated on building up their profits. That's all they did. They invested in parts of the world where children could be worked for 12 hours a day 7 days a week, where grown men and women could be treated like slaves and all for a pittance and they did this because we here in the west had made it illegal to work children, because we'd abolished slavery, because we had fought for workers' rights, for a minimum wage, for a 40 hr week, for pensions, for the right to retire, for a free NHS, for free education, all of these things were getting in the way of them making a quick and easy profit and worse …had been making us feel we were worth something. ~ Arun D. Ellis

Any society which enjoins its members to adhere to both of these (politeness and truth) is a fraud. ~ Idries Shah

Tell me something true about you."
"Okay …" She mentally rifled through birthplace (Portland, Oregon), college major (sociology), astrological sign (Virgo), favorite movie (The Apple Dumpling Gang - don't judge), until she hit a fact that wasn't completely mundane. "One of my favorite things in the world are those charity events where everyone buys a rubber ducky with a number and the first person's duck to get down the river wins."
"Why?"
"I like seeing the river teeming with all those outrageously yellow and orange ducks. It's so friendly. And I love the hope of it. Even though it doesn't matter if you win, because all that wonderful, candy-colored money is going to something really important like a free clinic downtown or cleft palate operations for children in India, you still have that playful hope that you will win. You run alongside the stream, not knowing which is your duck but imagining the lead one is yours."
"And this is the essence of your soul - the ducky race?"
"Well, you didn't ask for the essence of my soul. You asked for something true about me, and so I went for something slightly embarrassing and secret but true nonetheless. Next time you want the essence of my soul, I'll oblige you with sunsets and baby's laughter and greeting cards with watercolor flowers."
He squinted at her thoughtfully. "No, so far as I'm concerned, the yellow duckies are the essence of your soul. ~ Shannon Hale

Though his public teaching lasted only three years, it has been scrutinized by scholars in every science - among them theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to name a few. Jesus' influence has founded universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Now spanning the entire globe, Jesus' followers have been inspired throughout the centuries to set up educational institutions to teach what he taught. ~ Jon Morrison

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling. ~ Charles E. Rosenberg

On Individualism:

"Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist," Martin said with a smile. "Because I question Jefferson and the unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I who am its avowed enemy."

"Now you please to be facetious," was all the other could say.

"Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in equality, and yet you do the work of corporations, and the corporations, from day to day, are busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me a socialist, because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live up to. The Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight the battle against equality with the very good word on their lips. In the name of equality they destroy equality. That is why I called them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary and eternal foe of socialism."

"But you frequent socialist meetings," Mr. Morse challenged.

"Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you to learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings. They are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books. Any one of them knows more about sociology and all the other ologies than the average captain of industry. Yes, I have been t ~ Jack London

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department. ~ Thomas Sowell

When the character of a person is not clear to me, i look at their handwriting. ~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Never lie. Firstly, you will be caught in the lie sooner or later. Secondly, count on problems when repairing the consequences of the lie. Therefore, always tell the truth no matter how unpleasant it is. ~ Eraldo Banovac

Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please. ~ Katandra Jackson Nunnally

I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society
call it communism, if you will
in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced. ~ Michael Burawoy

Now wonder our youth is confused and in pain; they long for God, for the transcendent, and they are offered, far too often, either piosity or sociology, neither of which meets their needs, and they are introduced to churches which have become buildings that are a safe place to go to escape the awful demands of God. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

It's the intellectual who transforms the concept of the world into the problem of meaning. ~ Max Weber

Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell. ~ Joe Bageant

The natural fact that in every society exist children and adults, young and old, women and men, sick and healthy, weak and strong, as well as the socially marginalized and privileged, poor and rich, attracts the attention of sociologists and particularly lawyers only when problems appear in the social relations between these groups. ~ Milovan M. Mitrović

Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors - ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply. ~ Sam Harris

The more invested I am in my own ideas about reality, the more those experiences will feel like victimizations rather than the ups and downs of relating. Actually, I believe that the less I conceptualize things that way, the more likely it is that people will want to stay by me, because they will not feel burdened, consciously or unconsciously, by my projections, judgments, entitlements, or unrealistic expectations. ~ David Richo

We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down. ~ Philip Pullman

Religion thrives on want and fear of the unknown, on lack of education. A frightened and confused human is fed by religious institutions with the illusion that the solution to his real problems is to appeal to the good will of an imaginary supernatural divinity religious institutions claim to represent. With one hand they offer a cup of rice and a pair of used shoes someone else has paid for. With the other, they place the Bible on the table, setting up the poor in spirit for the belief trap. ~ Paul Greene

For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club. ~ Thomas Szasz

In our society, defecation involves an
individual in activity which is defined as inconsistent with
the cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of our
performances. Such activity also causes the individual to
disarrange his clothing and to 'go out of play, that is, to
drop from his face the expressive mask that he employs in
face-to-face interaction. At the same time ic becomes difficult
for him to reassemble his personal front should the need to
enter into interaction suddenly occur. Perhaps that is a
reason why toilet doors in our society have locks on them. ~ Erving Goffman

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

Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that "animals try to spread their genes." That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes "try" to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe. ~ Steven Pinker

Performance art is really about the sociology of the artist, where ideas come from, and the confluence of those ideas. ~ Roselee Goldberg

My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky. ~ Sam Abell

By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life. ~ Georg Simmel

Yankee Stadium, it's like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down. ~ Bob Feller

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

I wasn't a great student; I was lazy. But when I was in sociology class, I listened. ~ Eric Stonestreet

My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry. ~ Vilfredo Pareto

Design, to me, is part psychology, part sociology, and part magic. A good decorator should know what's going on in someone's marriage and how their kids are doing in school. ~ Nate Berkus

As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer on my ground. ~ David S. Landes

Sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century. ~ Pierre L. Van Den Berghe

The conventional way of understanding taste, according to Distinction, is to view it as a capacity for aesthetic judgments in areas such as music, art, and literature. Though rarely made explicit, it is well understood that taste can be found only among the elite, and that the lower classes lack it. Bourdieu argues that it is imperative to break with this concept of taste and replace it with one that is sociological in nature. In order to do so, Bourdieu expands the concept of taste from including only "aesthetic consumption" to including "ordinary consumption," that is, the consumption of clothing, furniture, and food ([1979] 1986:100). He also extends the concept of taste to all social classes, and shows that what constitutes "good taste" is very much part of the struggle for domination in society. ~ Richard Swedberg

In reality, there is no highway to success. Therefore, be prepared for difficulties. ~ Eraldo Banovac

Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons. ~ Kathryn Stockett

Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it. ~ Steven Pressfield

The method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term "method" must be reinterpreted and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cerebral process. In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our power to name ourselves, the world or God. The old naming was not the product of dialogue- a fact inadvertently admitted in the genesis story of Adam's naming the animals and the women. Women are now realizing that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate. ~ Mary Daly

Be patient in life, knowing that there is a real possibility that the desired outcome could happen without your direct involvement. ~ Eraldo Banovac

Thus, the sons of Plato proclaim "the death of God," i.e., the God of Scripture, because He refuses to exist in terms of their definition. It does not greatly trouble them to proclaim God dead; in fact, the supposed funeral is their celebration. The "death" of the God of Scripture, however, requires the death of the man created in His image, and, as a result, "the death of God" society seeks then to destroy historical man, the real man of time, in order to create a new man in terms of their idea and purpose.

Man as an Idea in philosophy and sociology is an inhuman abstraction; he is a monster who neither exists nor can exist. ~ Rousas John Rushdoony

Mari was what was known as an underachiever, which even an underachiever knew was sociology code for "overfailer." She was famous in the Lore for the simple fact that one day she might be worth being famous. All hype-no substance. That was Mari. ~ Kresley Cole

I have an economics degree with a minor in sociology. The reason I have that is because I want to do a ministry in urban areas and help with underprivileged kids. ~ Jeremy Lin