Emile Durkheim Quotes

When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.

Wherefore for the public interest and benefit of human society it is requisite that the highest obligations possible should be laid upon the consciences of men.

A human society obeys the dictates of reason and is guided and governed by a respect for justice.

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.

In justice to human society it may perhaps be said of almost all the polities and civil institutions in the world, however imperfect, that they have been founded in and carried on with very considerable wisdom.

When, in any ethical department, unity is attained between outer demands and inner desires, between nature and conscience, between the needs of society and the individual, the moral formula is void because inner necessity then makes it psychically and physically impossible to break the outer law. Thus, true morality is attained.

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.

Custom, that is before all law; Nature, that is above all art.

Society cannot exist without law. Law is the bond of society: that which makes it, that which preserves it and keeps it together. It is, in fact, the essence of civil society.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

The philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there.

No true and perfect human society can be conceived which is not governed by some supreme authority…. Do the sheep when they are all assembled together rule and guide the shepherd?

The basic notion of justice, is that the rights of everybody are equals, in principle. In the rights of others, we have to respect our own rights. It is only in that condition that we can reasonably require that it be respected by others…. The realization of justice is, in the actual state of things, a matter of life or death for society and for civilization itself.

Man is not made for society, but society is made for man.

Morality is the object of government.

… those are not to be tolerated who deny the being of God because promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, which can have no hold upon an atheist.

In our society, authority derives from justice, and in our society, learning to live with authority should derive from and aid learning to understand and to feel justice.

You can't build a society without law.

The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.

Without God, there is no virtue because there is no prompting of the conscience; without God, there is a coarsening of the society; without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

We cannot abdicate our conscience to an organization, nor to a government. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Most certainly I am! I cannot escape my responsibility by saying the State will do all that is necessary. It is a tragedy that nowadays so many think and feel otherwise.

Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.