Sociologist Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

Paul Lazarsfeld

Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.

Albion Woodbury Small

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

Christian Smith (sociologist)

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

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

Mirra Komarovsky

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

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.

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

A group of women who valued motherhood, but valued it on their own timetable, began to make a new claim, one that had never surfaced in the abortion debate before this, that abortion was a woman's right. Most significantly, they argued that this right to abortion was essential to their right to equality -- the right to be treated as individuals rather than as potential mothers.

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.

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.

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

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

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.