Sociology Quotes

• The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Thinking, Way, Difficulty

  Pierre Bourdieu, John B. Thompson (1991). “Language and Symbolic Power”, p.207, Harvard University Press

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• The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion.

  C. Wright Mills

  Knowledge, Frustration, Political Will

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings”, p.184, Univ of California Press

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• The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Function, Sociological

  Pierre Bourdieu, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (1999). “On Television”, p.17, The New Press

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• Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?

  C. Wright Mills

  Asking, May, Results

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• Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

  Toni Morrison

  Art, African American, Tolerance

  Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.258, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Suicide, Philosophy

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• Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

  Albion Woodbury Small

  Modern, Born, Ardor

  1894 An Introduction to the Study of Society (with George E Vincent, 1894).

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• I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Art, Mean, Self

  "La sociologie est un sport de combat". Documentary, May 2, 2001.

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• We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.

  Karl Popper

  Gratitude, Humility, Math

  "Karl Popper". Book by Bryan Magee, 1973.

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• Sociology isthescience of talk, and there is onlyone law in sociology. Bad talk drives out good.

  Frank Knight

  Law

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• Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

  Hortense Calisher

  Science, Alarms, Guilty

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• There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

  Emile Durkheim

  Character, Names, Historical

  Emile Durkheim (2014). “The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method”, p.160, Simon and Schuster

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• While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make.

  Bertrand Russell

  People, Choices, Economics

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• With sociology one can do anything and call it work

  Malcolm Bradbury

  Can Do

  Malcolm Bradbury (1978). “Eating people is wrong”, Vintage

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• The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Sight, Tasks, Helping

  "The sociologist influencing Labour's new generation". Interview with Randeep Ramesh, www.theguardian.com. November 3, 2010.

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• The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Believe, People, Sick

  "Life Is Worth Living". TV Series (1952-1957); transcript was later published in Fulton J. Sheen "Life is Worth Living: First and Second Series" (Second Series, p. 186), 1953.

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• It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

  Emile Durkheim

  Men, Historical, Analysis

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• Sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual. There is no principle for which we have received more criticism; but none is more fundamental. Indubitably for sociology to be possible, it must above all have an object all its own. It must take cognizance of a reality which is not in the domain of other sciences... there can be no sociology unless societies exist, and that societies cannot exist if there are only individuals.

  Emile Durkheim

  Reality, Practice, Criticism

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• Every individual is representative of the whole . . . and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.

  Anais Nin

  Giving, Understanding, Individuality

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• Social media is about sociology and psychology more then technology.

  Brian Solis

  Technology, Media, Psychology

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• Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

  David Riesman

  Freedom, Men, Class

  David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Reuel Denney (2001). “The Lonely Crowd”, p.307, Yale University Press

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• Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography.

  Brian Solis

  Technology, Media, Social

  Brian Solis (2011). “Engage!, Revised and Updated: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web”, p.3, John Wiley & Sons

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• I really want to go back to school and finish up my sociology degree.

  Alicia Sacramone

  School, Degrees, Want

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• Sociology is the science with the greatest number of methods and the least results.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Technology, Numbers

  Science et Methode ch. 1 (1908)

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• IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology.

  C. Wright Mills

  Reality, Plus, Ibm

  "Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills". Book edited by Irving Louis Horowitz, 1963.

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