Famous quotes by Sociologists

"Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women"

"One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism"

"Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's"

"The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation - or a relationship"

"For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships"

"Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone"

"Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations"

"We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has"

"We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups"

"It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term"

"Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy"

"The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude"

"Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful"

"I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways"

"We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization"

"The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance"

"If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes"

"When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear"

"The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture"

"I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization"

"Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others"

"But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world"

"Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally"

"Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy"

"In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state"

"There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved"

"Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic"

"So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy"

"If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe"

"It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity"