Eugene Kennedy Quotes

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.

It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of one's relationship with that person and how it can fail to influence that person.

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

Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.

Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.

Most attractive males talk to most attractive women as if they were Rotarians comparing sales percentages in Des Moines.

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

We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

Society becomes how we behave.

There's politics in all aspects of our daily lives.

As social animals we humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive.

There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor - all subtly different personas.

All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.

I love to study people, and that's basically what sociology is.

Why is it that when men and women congregate, though the men may beat the women in numbers by ten to one, and through they certainly speak the louder, the concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women's voices?

What goes for sex goes double for politics.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

How we behave in our public lives inevitably reflects values, attitudes and experiences embedded in our private lives and vice versa.

Politics begins when you have two people in a room or when you have one person looking in a mirror.

… the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts.

I don't want to become a serious, annoying sociologist. I try to regard sociology as a part of everyday life.

The principles and passions of men are always the same and lead to the same result, varying only according to the circumstances in which they are placed.

I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.