Sociologist Quotes

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

Randall Collins

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Hubert M. Blalock, Jr.

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

A rational religion is a scientific impossibility...