Emile Durkheim Quotes

Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.

Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.

In the world I lived in, the world of human people, there were ties and debts and consequences and good deeds. That was what bound people to society; maybe that was what constituted society. And I tried to live in my little niche in it the best way I could.

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.

Public opinion alone can keep a society pure and healthy.

Every society has the criminals it deserves.

Where there is not community, trust, respect, ethical behavior are difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain.

Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.

Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

Societies are not sustainable without institutions.

In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

A society is not a market. It is a political community.

Societies depend on agreed rules.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

I believe that communal admiration of individuals is healthy for society. It facilitates, in one way, the base of our universal standard, morals, but also publicly espouses the virtue of certain practices that are kind of like 'inherently good' in some kind of ideas of what the good is.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

Protestant Christianity ... tutored the first generations of Americans. It provided what we today would call the value system of the society.

Civilization depends on morality.

Society becomes how we behave.

The unit of effectiveness of education is not the individual but the group. An individual's moral values are primarily important for society as they contribute to a moral social climate, not as they induce particular pieces of behavior.

Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.

Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable.

The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.