20th-century Sociologist Quotes

Men make their own history; but they make it under given conditions, and they become entangled thereby in a fate which is in part the result of other men having made their own history earlier.

Reinhard Bendix

The only way to change American society, and indeed I think this is true of other societies as well, is for people to discover the power latent in the cooperative roles that they play in a range of institutions.

Frances Fox Piven

Removing religion from the womb of culture has become the practiced virtue of the ACLU over the past several decades.

How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

Lillian B. Rubin

Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.

The black bourgeoisie, who have striven to mold themselves in the image of the white man, have not been able to escape from the mark of racial inferiority.

E. Franklin Frazier

Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip...fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.

Evangelicals come from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but nearly 90 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelicals are white.

Christian Smith (sociologist)

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Mirra Komarovsky

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.

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

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

Randall Collins

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

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

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

Hubert M. Blalock, Jr.

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

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