Sociologist Quotes

The world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.

Siegfried Kracauer

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.

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

It is no more the function of government to impose a moral code than to impose a religious code. And for the same reason.

Robert Morrison MacIver

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

Elise M. Boulding

A self-conscious society will therefore endeavor to limit sect forming by providing for the widest possible diffusion of secular knowledge.

Edward Alsworth Ross

No one who traces the history of motherhood, of the home, of child-rearing practices will ever assume the eternal permanence of our own way of institutionalizing them.

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

Randall Collins

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

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.

Every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

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.

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

By reacting to aggression with aggression we lose the opportunity to spiritually benefit from the experience.

Kyriacos C. Markides

When evaluating a model, at least two broad standards are relevant. One is whether the model is consistent with the data. The other is whether the model is consistent with the 'real world.'

Kenneth A. Bollen

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.

If patriarchy had a specific beginning in history, it can also have an end

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

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 function of State coercion is to override individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association of individuals within the State. It is by this means that it maintains liberty of expression, security of person and property, genuine freedom of contract, the rights of public meeting and association, and finally its own power to carry out common objects undefeated by the recalcitrance of individual members.

Leonard Hobhouse

Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eye of its beholder turn the educated modern Western women into a harem slave.

Fatema Mernissi

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

Duncan J. Watts

I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor, and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the 'economic means' for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the 'political means'.

Franz Oppenheimer

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.

Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles.

These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and no where else.