Thomas Mann Quotes

Can we ignore what is going on around us, can we disconnect ourselves, our own material situation, our spiritual selves, who we are, can we disconnect that from history and the social context of our lives? The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we cannot, that we are social creatures.

Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

A lot of people can have a lot of different influences, everyone can be compared in some way to someone whether they are from 60 years ago or more recent.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

Each generation of adolescents has at least two historical events that color its responses to whatever happens next.

I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

Man is a child of his environment.

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

It's the community that helps form our moral compass. It's those attitudes that I've remembered through my entire lifetime.

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.