Émile Durkheim - Morality Quotes

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Kant postulates God, since without this hypothesis morality is unintelligible. We postulate a society specifically distinct from individuals, since otherwise morality has no object and duty no roots.

Émile Durkheim
Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.

Émile Durkheim
Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.

Émile Durkheim
There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.

Émile Durkheim
Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

Émile Durkheim
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.

Émile Durkheim