Sociology Quotes - Page 5

Superficial people consider themselves capable of doing everything. The question, however, is who is willing to hire them?

Another myth that is firmly upheld is that disabled people are dependent and non-disabled people are independent. No one is actually independent. This is a myth perpetuated by disablism and driven by capitalism - we are all actually interdependent. Chances are, disabled or not, you don’t grow all of your food. Chances are, you didn’t build the car, bike, wheelchair, subway, shoes, or bus that transports you. Chances are you didn’t construct your home. Chances are you didn’t sew your clothing (or make the fabric and thread used to sew it). The difference between the needs that many disabled people have and the needs of people who are not labelled as disabled is that non-disabled people have had their dependencies normalized. The world has been built to accommodate certain needs and call the people who need those things independent, while other needs are considered exceptional. Each of us relies on others every day. We all rely on one another for support, resources, and to meet our needs. We are all interdependent. This interdependence is not weakness; rather, it is a part of our humanity.

There are certain questions that scientists may not ask, or, more accurately, for some questions, there are certain answers that scientists must a priori preclude from consideration.

A wise man does not give quick answers to complex questions – he observes, analyzes and contemplates.

Being blinded in love and friendship is a common mistake.

My students often ask me, 'What is sociology?' And I tell them, 'It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see.

Acquiring knowledge through the centuries has influenced human society more than all other factors.

The people who overcome their fears are the ones who can achieve their dreams.

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.

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.

As social phenomena, languages are tied up in world of unequal power relations, gaining or losing status not based on technical linguistic grounds but on social judgement, biases, and stereotypes that are based on the status of their speakers. As such, we argue that white America's love-hate relationship with black modes of communication can only be interpreted within a framework that considers language a primary site of cultural contestation. It should be clear by now that it's about more than a mothafucka, right? Our analysis of Black Language forms that the dominant culture considers inflammatory, controversial, or stigmatized allows us to make several observations. First, building off what anthropologist and linguist Arthur Spears noted in his discussion of uncensored speech, Black verbal culture, like all cultures is "a complex network of predispositions, values, behaviors, expectations and routines." Language practices, in their varying sociocultural contexts, can only be understood if read within the full range of the community's speech activities, and that requires rigorous ethnographic search and analysis. Second the community's beliefs and ideas about language- it's language ideologies- should be the primary point of departure for investigation and interpretation.

Everything returns and renews itself. The difference now is that the rate of these returns has increased, in both space and time, in an unheard-of fashion. Now my thoughts can circle the globe in minutes. Entire passages of world history are played out in a couple of years.

The wind considers how trauma is - in essence - just a memory that violates previous memories too barbarically, an event that devastatingly conflicts against everything else one knows.

If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.

Mr Baley", said Quemot, "you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain"."I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case.

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.

Every society has the criminals that it deserves.

Sometimes people think the old days were better than today. Even though life was simpler and slower, it was not necessarily easier.

Telling the truth is less demanding than telling a lie.

Is it possible that power can conquer matter, that the soul makes a mightier truth than the body, that life has a meaning that survives life itself, that good survives evil as life survives death, that God, after all, is more powerful than the Devil?

People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

When you love someone you have chosen to relinquish a part of yourself in order to inherit a part of them, and what perpetuates that love is the feeling of confident appreciation for such a potentially debilitating trade. That's why heartbreak feels like a sudden void.

What you think can determine what you can achieve! So think big to achieve great things!

It should be apparent that the belief in objectivity in journalism, as in other professions, is not just a claim about what kind of knowledge is reliable. It is also a moral philosophy, a declaration of what kind of thinking one should engage in, in making moral decisions. It is, moreover, a political commitment, for it provides a guide to what groups one should acknowledge as relevant audiences for judging one's own thoughts and acts.

I have been at war with parts of myself for so long

A free man does not do what must be done, but what should be done.

But who knows why we really do anything? Who knows why we do what we do when we do it? Why your local barista greeted you with a curt 'hi' instead of her usual, mellifluous-sounding 'hello' has a trillion justifications. So, why someone decides to commit suicide might take a while to explain, and a lifetime to begin comprehending...

In general, people accumulate knowledge gradually over a long period of time. However, there are extraordinary people all around us, who are capable of accumulating impressive amounts of knowledge within a relatively short period of time. Nevertheless, even the greatest genius possesses only a small fraction of all knowledge known by mankind. Finally, the following question arises: how large is all the existing knowledge in comparison to the space of ignorance?

In real life, the truth is a rarity, while lies are common place.

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

Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.

At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.

We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.

If you cannot solve a problem, ask someone who knows.

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.

Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it.

Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.

Even when we are confused about someone’s gender, and don’t have a greater awareness of what it means to be trans, we have a choice to respond with kindness rather than cruelty.

Only when we learn to value the differences among us can we achieve the true spirit of humanity.

It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.

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.

Our beliefs affect our behavior towards others. And that makes ourbeliefs, not just a personal question, but an ethical one.

Most people take health at face value. Quite often people understand that health is the most valuable possession only after they become seriously ill.

False fears are a plague, a modern plague!

Guilty people apologize and also take steps to avoid repetition. Shame, in contrast, is a more global emotion, which can emerge in response to the same kind of wrong act and violation of standards. It may develop earlier in life than guilt-- guilt requires more cognitive sorting capacity-- but above all it emphasizes self-abasement. It is the self that is at fault, not the commission of the act. This creates greater pain and intensity than guilt. A shamed person feels very bad indeed-- but also makes it more difficult to escape.

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.

The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

Use two-way communication on oral exams to check the students' knowledge, not their attitudes. Checking attitudes can lead to the slippery area of subjective assessment.

Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion.

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.

In reality, there is no highway to success. Therefore, be prepared for difficulties.

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.

Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king

And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.

The problem with capitalism is that "we have a global theology without morality, without a Bible." And that's dangerous, he warns - "we're not going to be able to exist in a global context if we are the bastards of our business.

I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.

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

Be prepared to change yourself if you think there is a need to change your environment.

Is this World a reality or just a Human perceptions?

Character depends on characters. Few people are character. Other's should try to opt one but they don't, they lose.