20th-century Sociologist Quotes

Because the activists usually cash out their holdings shortly after their demands are accepted or rejected, the question remains whether most of them are committed to companies' future success. The risk is significant that their initiatives can weaken a company's competitive position, to the detriment of long-term shareholders, and the high-leverage financing structures they often propose may put companies in jeopardy in the event of an economic downturn.

Treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous; what is worse, it is scientifically nonsensical.

Organisations are technical instruments; designed as means to definite goals... they are expendable. Institutions... may be partly engineered, but they have also a natural dimension. They are the products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.

Philip Selznick

Education doesn't have aims. It is the aim of other things.

Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.

They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.

Remember your ancestors, dream of your descendants and work hard while you're living.

Priest organizations around the country, both local and national, should realize that their membership has a serious image problem and undertake programs to improve it.

Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.

When buffering, leveling, and forecasting do not protect their technical cores from environmental fluctuations, organizations under norms of rationality resort to rationing.

James D. Thompson

The aggregate effect of advertising is to bring about wide sharing of tastes. The actual social function of advertising is not to mold taste in any particular way, nor to debase it.... It does not matter what people want to buy as long as they want to buy enough of the same thing to make mass production possible. Advertising helps to unify taste, to de-individualize it and thus to make mass production possible.

Ernest van den Haag

The social action approach, assumes there is a disadvantaged (often oppressed) segment of the population that needs to be organized, perhaps in alliance with others, in order to pressure the power structure for increased resources or for treatment more in accordance with democracy or social justice.

Charles Zastrow

He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.

Peter L. Berger

Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and political rights have limited meaning for women. If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives...

The contemporary quarrel over church and state is not really about whether a wall of separation of church and state should exist or not... The real question is what does 'separation' mean?

James Davison Hunter

The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world.

To know thyself is the ultimate form of aggression.

Marion J. Levy Jr.

A balance is necessary in life. To achieve this we must move away from broad definitions of workplaces as functional and households as emotional. Similarly, home, the haven in a heartless world, as defined by men, cannot be used by them as an antidote to the workplace's discomforts and demands, if this means having the wife as a servicer.

The way to find your own North Star is not to think or feel your way
forward but to dissolve the thoughts and feeling that make you miserable.
You don't have to learn your destiny--you already know it; you just have to unlearn the thoughts that blind you to what you know.

That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set.

Robert N. Bellah

When three generations are present in a family, one of them is bound to be revolutionary.

Elise M. Boulding

The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.

Music does more than soothe the soul, it brings balance to the mind, body, and spirit.

Whenever there is an absolute truth at stake, the manners become careless. This applies both to the owners as well as their opponents of that truth and to all people involved.

Research is something that everyone can do, and everyone ought to do. It is simply collecting information and thinking systematically about it. The word 'research' carries overtones of abstruse statistics and complex methods, white coats and computers. Some social research is highly specialised but most is not; much of the best research is logically very straightforward. Useful research on many problems can be done with small resources, and should be a regular part of the life of any thoughtful person involved in social action.