20th-century Sociologist Quotes

In the economic sphere, class has become more important than race in determining black access to privilege and power.

William Julius Wilson

To ask questions of the sort which philosophers address to themselves is usually to paralyze the mind...

Bob Merton became the leader of structural-functional analysis in sociology, and the leader of those sociologists who attempted to create social theories that could be empirically tested... He was an inspirational teacher and editor, and with his students, such as James S. Coleman and Seymour Martin Lipset, among many others who would become leading figures in the field, he helped to build and legitimate the field of sociology in America... For me, he was a model teacher and mentor, a trusted colleague, and a close friend. His death, in many ways, puts a period at the end of 20th Century sociology,

Jonathan R. Cole

What I am and what I know I owe to my father's library and to my mother's salon.

Nicolaus Sombart

All too often modern man becomes the plaything of his circumstances because he no longer has any leisure time; he doesn't know how to provide himself with the leisure he needs to stop to take a good look at himself.

Tocqueville saw the brute repression of deviants as a necessity if men were to keep convincing themselves of their collective dignity through their collective sameness. The "poets of society," the men who challenged the norms, would have to be silenced so that sameness could be maintained.

Richard Sennett

Electronic communication makes possible what has previously been excluded: namely, active, simultaneous and reciprocal contact between individuals across all frontiers constituted by countries, religions and continents.

And when such claims are extraordinary, that is, revolutionary in their implications for established scientific generalizations already accumulated and verified, we must demand extraordinary proof.

Marcello Truzzi

America seems to be at once the most religious and the most secular of all nations.

The manipulation of statistical formulas is no substitute for knowing what one is doing.

Hubert M. Blalock, Jr.

Why can I write 'South' with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?

John Shelton Reed

Challenging the status quo takes commitment, courage, imagination, and, above all, dedication to learning.

The most successful exploiter is the one who makes others feel that he or she has their best interests at heart.

Randall Collins

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

Gossip, then, is content, a message about people; rumor is a process. It takes a bit of gossip and reshapes it, modifies it in some way, and passes it along from individual to individual in different ways.

The greatest danger of traditional education is that learning may remain purely verbal.

Mirra Komarovsky

The fate of the people of Black Metropolis—whether they will remain the marginal workers to be called in only at times of great economic activity, or will become an integral part of the American economy and thus lay the basis for complete social and political integration—depends not so much on what happens locally as on what happens in America and the world.

St. Clair Drake

We should drop the terms black and white... Not only are the terms black and white denotatively loaded in favor of Euro-Americans—as a check in The Oxford English Dictionary will attest in lurid detail—but by their emphasis on the somatic, they reinforce and legitimize precisely that biological notion of "race" that we claim we want to be rid of.

Orlando Patterson

Our agenda, by necessity, is as complex and encompassing as the problems we face: beware of politicians promising simple solutions.

Cooperation is in fact the living and productive pulsation of the multitudo. Cooperation is the articulation in which an infinite number of the singularities are composed as productive essence of the new. Cooperation is innovation, richness, and thus the basis of the creative surplus that defines the expression of the multitudo.

The power of science consists, in the first place, in its conflation of knowledge and truth. Devising a method of proving the validity of propositions about objects taken as external to the knower has become identical with what we mean by truth.

Stanley Aronowitz

Good publishers – as one former publisher aptly put it – are market-makers in a world where it is attention, not content, that is scarce.

John Thompson (sociologist)

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

Paul Lazarsfeld

We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy.

Nicholas A. Christakis

The conveyer belt that transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down.

Frank Furstenberg