Sociologist Quotes

Émile Durkheim

Antonio Gramsci

W. E. B. Du Bois

Vilfredo Pareto

Manuel Castells

Alva Myrdal

Werner Sombart

In my opinion, fun is what makes advertising successful.

The main problem actors face is uncertainty caused by difficulties in finding suppliers and customers and in controlling their own firm.

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

Hubert M. Blalock, Jr.

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.

For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not merely passengers of history, but pilots as well.

I think that few people are aware how early it is right to respect the modesty of an infant.

Harriet Martineau

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.

System theories have been applied to a wide spectrum of empirical cases and policy issues. Parsons and his followers, in particular, applied their systems theory to diverse empirical phenomena in sociology as well as in other disciplines: modernization, economics, politics, social order, industrialization and development, Fascism and McCarthyism, international relations, social change and evolution, complex organizations, health care, universities, religion, professions, small groups, and family as well as abstract questions such as the place of norms in maintaining social order both historically and cross-nationally. Marxian theory and dynamic system theories have also been applied to a spectrum of diverse empirical and policy subjects.

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

A rational religion is a scientific impossibility...

It follows that the more definition is given, the more omniscient the management must be, so that no functions are left whole or partly undischarged, no person is overburdened with undelegated responsibility, or left without the authority to do his job properly.

Tom Burns (sociologist)

Moving further away from realist models, we come to some core ideas of modern sociological institutionalism (see DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001; Jepperson, 2002; Hasse & Kruecken, 2005). Here, actors are substantially empowered and controlled by institutional contexts, and these contexts go far beyond a few norms or network structures. Further, these contexts are by no means simply constructions built up by the contemporary actors themselves, but rather are likely to have prior and exogenous historical origins.

Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens...

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

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.

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

Nicolaus Sombart

The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe punishment, but this cannot and will not be done unless a healthy public sentiment demands and sustains such action.

When the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of learning, rather than in individual firms.

Walter W. Powell

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.

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.

Theories are just disposable tools in the production of knowledge

Manuel Castells

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

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.

The migratory movement is at once perpetual, partial and universal. It never ceases, it affects every people … [and although] at a given moment it sets in motion only a small number of each population … in fact there is never a moment of immobility for any people, because no migration remains isolated.

Eugene M. Kulischer

Even though fathers, grandparents, siblings, memories of ancestors are important agents of socialization, our society focuses on the attributes and characteristics of mothers and teachers and gives them the ultimate responsibility for the child's life chances.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot