Peter L. Berger Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

The game of sociology goes on in a spacious playground.

Peter L. Berger
He who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter—until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company.

Peter L. Berger
Protestant theologians have been increasingly engaged in playing a game whose rules have been dictated by their cognitive antagonists.

Peter L. Berger
Intellectuals have a particular variety of "recipe knowledge"; they know just enough to be able to get through their dealings with other intellectuals.

Peter L. Berger
The sociology of knowledge is concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality.

Peter L. Berger
In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.

Peter L. Berger
A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.

Peter L. Berger
Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.

Peter L. Berger
On the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism. On the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal. In other words, man's experience of himself always hovers in a balance between being and having a body, a balance that must be redressed again and again.

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

Peter L. Berger
The human organism is thus still developing biologically while already standing in a relationship to its environmont. In other words, the process of becoming man takes place in an interrelationship with an environment. (...) From the moment of birth, man's organismic development, and indeed a large part of his biological being as such, are subjected to continuing socially determined interference.

Peter L. Berger
To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.

Peter L. Berger
Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.

Peter L. Berger
An individual is generally ready to admit that he is ignorant of periods in the past or places on the other side of the globe. But he is much less likely to admit ignorance of his own period and his own place, especially if he is an intellectual.

Peter L. Berger