Quotes About Sociology

“As a general rule...people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. ”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar

“Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“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, War and Peace

“My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.”
― Bob Black, The Abolition of Work & Other Essays

“Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic. ”
― Ray Bradbury, The October Country

“People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
― Neil Postman

“Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.”
― Toni Morrison

“That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“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.”
― Robert Wright

“And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“The more invested I am in my own ideas about reality, the more those experiences will feel like victimizations rather than the ups and downs of relating. Actually, I believe that the less I conceptualize things that way, the more likely it is that people will want to stay by me, because they will not feel burdened, consciously or unconsciously, by my projections, judgments, entitlements, or unrealistic expectations.”
― David Richo, Daring to Trust: Opening Ourselves to Real Love and Intimacy

“It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.”
― Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

“الحديث مع فتاة متحررة بالنسبة لي هنا كان مثل نسمة هواء باردة و منعشة، أستعيد بها روحي التي كانت تختنق أمام تناقضات و إزدواجية فتيات يردن التحرر، بينما يقررن أن الزواج و الجلوس في البيت قد يكون نهاية المطاف، أو حتي بعض الفتيات المتحررات اللائي لا يرين غضاضة في أن ينفق عليهن رجل بالكامل. لم أستطع أن أفهم منطقهن الإنتهازي، الحصول على مزايا التحرر، و مزايا النظام الشرقي الأبوي التقليدي معا”
― إبراهيم فرغلي, جنية في قارورة

“False fears are a plague, a modern plague!”
― Michael Crichton, State of Fear

“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

“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, Guyland

“We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.”
― J.B. Priestley

“Perhaps the difference between a professor and a bus driver is that the professor can say stupid things with complete authority while the bus driver is not authorized to make brilliant insights.”
― Les Back, The Art of Listening

“It is culture that is the bully."

Orn Ald yos'Senchul to Theo Waitley, Saltation”
― Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

“For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

“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.”
― Bell Hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism

“...today, the only class which, in its 'subjective' self perception, explicitly conceives of an presents itself as a class is the notorious 'middle class' which is precisely the 'non-class': the allegedly hard-working middle strata of society which define themselves not only by their allegiance to firm moral and religious standards, but by a double opposition to both 'extremes' of the social space - non-patriotic 'deracinated' rich corporations on the one side; poor excluded immigrants and ghetto-members on the other. The 'middle class' grounds its identity in the exclusion of both extremes which, when they are directly counterpoised, give us 'class antagonism' at its purest. The constitutive lie of the very notion of the 'middle class' is thus the same as that of the true Party line between the two extremes of 'right-wing deviation' and left-wing deviation' in Stalinism: the 'middle class' is, in its very 'real' existence, the embodied lie, the denial of antagonism - in psychoanalytic terms, the 'middle class' is a fetish, the impossible intersection of left and right which, by expelling both poles of the antagonism into the position of antisocial 'extremes' which corrode the healthy social body (multinational corporations and intruding immigrants), presents itself as the neutral common ground of Society. In other words, the 'middle class' is the very form of the disavowal of the fact that 'Society doesn't exist' (Laclau) - in it, Society does exist.”
― Slavoj Žižek