Famous quotes by Sociologists

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

"In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth"

"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 man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble"

"America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub"

"The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc"

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

"Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real"

"The principal cause of war is war itself"

"Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions"

"People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages"

"Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests"

"Prestige is the shadow of money and power"

"What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited"

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

"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 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"