Quotes by Sociologists - Page 11

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell...
W.E.B. Du Bois
They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now thanthe Pyramids.
H.G.Wells
When and where there is repression, what a woman does when she gets dressed in the morning may be considered political. Wearing or not wearing a veil, disobeying laws that prohibit transgender dressing, or wearing a large Afro in an institution that seeks to diminish the formation of racial alliances are all actions that can serve as challenges to domination
Maxine Leeds Craig
Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.
DaShanne Stokes
Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
Jean Baudrillard
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours -- that's another matter.
H.G.Wells
An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.
DaShanne Stokes
In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.
Theodor W. Adorno
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.
Wilfred Trotter
A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time
Patrick Geddes
The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
H.G.Wells
government is legitimate not so much because it represents the 'general will', but because its policies are, ideally and counterfactually, the result of the public deliberation of all who are concerned by the decision
Frédéric Vandenberghe
If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.
H.G.Wells
It is characteristic of genius to be hopeful and aspiring.
Harriet Martineau
Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.
H.G.Wells
When we've got a common philosophy and a common objective; then we can advance in open order. We shall be a great team. But we've got to make sure of that common set of ideas. Maybe we shall find our formulae difficult for some of these new types. If we keep our minds open, we may find that they are right and that our formulae have to be modified. Probably -- it's a thought that shouldn't dishearten us -- but probably we don't know everything.
H.G.Wells
One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts--they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.
Georg Simmel
Racism is dead only to those who've closed their eyes and ears to the whole world around them.
DaShanne Stokes
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Lewis Mumford
A certain beauty in the world is no mark of God's favor, said Mr. Huss. There is no beauty one may not balance by an equal ugliness. The warthog and the hyena, the tapeworm and the stinkhorn, are equally God's creations. Nothing you have said points to anything but a cold indifference towards us of this order in which we live. Beauty happens; it is not given. Pain, suffering, happiness; there is no heed. Only in the heart of man burns the fire of righteousness.
H.G.Wells
Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: "What shall we do and how shall we live?"' That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of use to the one who puts the question correctly.
Max Weber
Jesus never says to the poor: ‘come find the church’, but he says to those of us in the church: ‘go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.
Tony Campolo
Increasing knowledge lessens the sphere of the supernatural.
Edvard Westermarck
If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.
Herbert Marcuse
Lies sound like facts to those who've been conditioned to mis-recognize the truth.
DaShanne Stokes
The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It wanted, — it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want.
H.G.Wells
What we all must decide is how we are valuable rather than how valuable we are.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What's the trouble?
H.G.Wells
Education is inherently socially inclusive any failure of inclusion signals the presence of power. An exclusive education is a corrupted education.
Raewyn W. Connell
Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.
DaShanne Stokes
Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, And are but slightly impressed by kindness, Which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed upon easy going masters, but the tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues. It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because having lost his power he resumes his place among the feeble who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to a crowd will always have the semblance of a Caesar, His insignia attract them, His authority overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear.
Gustave Le Bon
Toutes les opinions ne se valent pas, et il ne faut pas confondre l'éloquence d'une parole avec la justesse d'une pensée.
Tzvetan Todorov
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect.
Bruno Latour
Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey. The traveler in space or time is an explorer who happens upon utopia. He (or, more recently, she) meets its people, usually at first its ordinary people, observes them at work and play, sees their dwellings and their cities... The traveler is, as are we, the more prepared to accept the validity and desirability of the general principles for having seen with his own eyes its effects in the daily life of its inhabitants.
Krishan Kumar
Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.
Wolfgang Streeck
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
W.E.B. Du Bois
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Most institutions demand unqualified faith but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
Robert K. Merton
The notion that capital – as an infinitely ramified system of exploitation, an abstract, intangible but overpowering logic, a process without a subject or a subject without a face – poses formidable obstacles to its representation has often been taken in a sublime or tragic key. *Vast*, beyond the powers of individual or collective cognition; *invisible*, in its fundamental forms; *overwhelming*, in its capacity to reshape space, time and matter – but unlike the sublime, or indeed the tragic, in its propensity to thwart any reaffirmation of the uniqueness and interiority of a subject. Not a shipwreck *with* a spectator, but a shipwreck *of* the spectator.
Alberto Toscano
Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
Elise Boulding
Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on — up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely “animal” life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.
H.G.Wells
We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
Émile Durkheim
What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced
Jean Baudrillard
There have been few things in my life which have had a more genial effect on my mind than the possession of a piece of land
Harriet Martineau
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a 'collateral victim' of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other.
Zygmunt Bauman
... With the rise of modern scientific (or 'rational') knowledge religion is, for the first time, challenged by the disparate claims of other life-orders (Lebensordnungen)... a polytheistic and disordered world of competing values and ideals... the economic, political, aesthetic, erotic and intellectual, which, with the onset of modernity, separate out into relatively autonomous realms (the process of Eigengeseztlichkeit) with their own value-spheres (Wertsphären).
Nicholas Gane
Anthropologist Gary Weaver suggested looking at culture as a kind of iceberg: one portion is clearly visible above the surface of the water, while the much larger chunk of ice is hidden below. The part above the water can be considered surface culture––what we can physically see or hear, including behavior, words, customs, language, and traditions. Underneath the water, invisible to all, is the deep culture. This place includes our beliefs, values, assumptions, worldview, and thought processes.
David C. Pollock
Psychological man may be going nowhere, but he aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in going. Like his predecessor, the man of the market economy, he understands morality as that which is conducive to increased activity. The important thing is to keep going.
Philip Rieff
In a society not characterised by class exploitation, the relationship between the processes of surplus-production and reproduction of labour-power is qualitatively distinct from that characterising societies in which exploitation dominates...surplus-labour is identified by the nature of its contribution to social reproduction, not by the fact that it is provately appropriated.
Lise Vogel
Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh ... to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Charles Horton Cooley
There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, andnot in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever ismore than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or Icould not live.
H.G.Wells
Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.
Philip Rieff
As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.
H.G.Wells
There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort….The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come…it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.
Matthew Desmond
I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.
Charles Horton Cooley
The highest value in life is found in the stewardship of time.
Robert M. Fine
A president cannot defend a nation if he is not held accountable to its laws.
DaShanne Stokes