Sociology Quotes

The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.

~ Edward Bond

I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don't need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven't gotten laid since Bush Senior was president... Do you know who studies sociology? People who would rather observe life than live it.

~ Erin Mccarthy

What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

~ Christopher Henry Dawson

Yankee Stadium, it’s like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.

~ Bob Feller

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

~ Jennifer Egan

We assume that anything that is new to us is new to human society as a whole, and that if we don’t see it reflected in history textbooks and in recent memory then it cannot have existed for long.

~ C. N. Lester

Shame, as an emotion, has a core meaning, in relating individuals to wider social groups and norms -- real or imagined.

~ Peter N. Stearns

It is not acceptable that election winners interpret history. History should be left to historians who have a difficult task. They should try to avoid a one-sided or personal interpretation of history. Furthermore, some collective factors (such as national enthusiasm) may influence objectivity that is crucial for the interpretation of historical events.

~ Eraldo Banovac

The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.

~ Chris Weedon

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

~ Karl Marx

Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.

~ Jane Jacobs

Good managers don't set a goal to increase efficiency, but rather an implementation of business process improvements that result in higher efficiency as well.

~ Eraldo Banovac

Single parents - both women and men - can play as critical a role as the traditional two-parent family, and gay and lesbian parents can, and do, raise happy, resilient children. When it comes to family life, form is not merely as important as content. Feeling loved and supported, nurtured and safe, is far more critical than the 'package' it comes in.

~ Michael S. Kimmel

It is one thing to be understanding of human weakness and the complexities of life, and another to accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality. Let us not fall into the sin of trying to replace the Creator. We are creatures, and not omnipotent. Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.

~ Pope Francis

Love without humility results in the inclination to act as everyone's parent, humility without love results in the need to be everyone's child, and love with humility results in the desire to be a friend.

~ Criss Jami

Perhaps we should rejoice that people’s emotions aren’t designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one’s group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That’s why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group’s, the outcomes are some of the history’s worst atrocities.

~ Steven Pinker

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaIntellectual: One who knows no craft.

~ Idries Shah

Power, it seems, is one of those terms we all understand and can explain--until asked to do so.

~ Martin N. Marger

Rather than looking for explanations for why all people deserve to be treated with compassion and respect, we ought to be working at creating a world in which people are treated with compassion and respect. Human rights aren’t lying around waiting to be discovered. They’re made, not found.

~ David Livingstone Smith

In reality, commissions rarely solve complicated problems. Therefore, the following question arises: what is worse – to establish a commission knowing it cannot solve a complicated problem, or to believe that the commission will truly solve such a problem?

~ Eraldo Banovac

Is this World a reality or just a Human perceptions?

~ Bash

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Many ancient (and contemporary) societies considered the sexually awakened femaleas both auspicious and dangerous.

~ Srinivasan

They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is still the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety-

~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

Language has everything to do with oppression and liberation. When the word victory means conquer vs. harmony and the word equality means homogenization vs. unity in/through diversity, then the liberation of a people from a minority class to communal stakeholders becomes much more difficult. Oppression has deep linguistic roots. We see it in conversations which interchange the idea of struggle with suffering in order to normalize abuse. We are the creators of our language, and our definitions shape the perceptions we have of the world. The first step to ending oppression is finding a better method of communication which is not solely dependent on a language rooted in the ideology of oppressive structures.

~ Cristina Marrero

[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

~ Angela Y. Davis

Some critics of trans people have told us that we shouldn’t feel this pain of being denied the legitimacy of our own selves; gender is, of course, just a social construct. I wonder if these people also tell widows not to bother grieving their husbands, because marriage is also just another social construct.

~ C. N. Lester

Trying to take away someone’s language is usually the first step in trying to change them.

~ C. N. Lester

When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown back!...Since imagination is hungry for novelty, and ungoverned, it gropes at random

~ Émile Durkheim

People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design… there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.

~ E.m. Forster

A knowledge both of the factors of evolution and how they operate in human society becomes necessary if we are to develop a sound social order.

~ Conway Zirkle

The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There's a big difference between you are what you click and you are what you share.

~ Eli Pariser

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

~ D.w. Winnicott

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

~ Noam Chomsky

Everyone is so locked into the current way of doing things, they never see the larger picture or other, more responsible and efficient possibilities. A REAL economy is always wanting to limit consumption/manufacturing as much as possible by assuring the strategically best and adaptable productions at all times, while keeping balance with human needs and public health.It is a total shift in intent than what we have today.

~ Peter Joseph

As you try to balance between the socialist and capitalist systems in the world, you will come up against the biggest problem facing humanity today. Jung wrote in 1938 Any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. Each of these systems promotes itself by pointing out the moral failings of the other, but these moral failings are actually failings brought about by people acting within the context of large organizations. What is truly needed is to learn a structure of organization of human beings that provides for the organized group the same capacity and propensity for moral behavior that is possessed by individuals.

~ Anonymous

Politics divides a nation, instead of bringing its people together.

~ Anonymous

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

~ C. Wright Mills

All social interactions require some loss of freedom.

~ Erol Ozan