Emile Durkheim Quotes

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.

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

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

Sports must become an indispensable and inseparable part of our social life. Competitiveness is just a by-product.

The celebrated Adam Smith was the first to point out the immense increase of production, and the superior perfection of products referable to this division of labour.

There are some with brains and some without. It makes for a better division of labour.

Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.

I worry about America. For the first time in my lifetime, I'm worried about us, i'm worried about how our values to some degree have been eroded, of personal responsibility and compassion and teamwork. I worry about it, I worry about the fact that we're so divided.

Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

Without social identity, there is, in fact, no society.

Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity

The ideals that bind us together are as old as our nation, but so are the forces that pull us apart.

This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality... Solidarity which comes from likenesses is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it... when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life.

Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics... The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.

Society in its full sense . . . is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

All systems require myths for their longevity.

It seems evident that the basis for civil safety is homogeneity. A culture which is socially uniform is pretty well devoid of informal violence.

The spread of personal ownership is in harmony with the deepest instincts of the British people. Few changes have done more to create one nation.

All societies are based on a sort of minimum level of communism. Otherwise, you couldn't have any social relations at all.

Trying to keep a society together, trying to keep the older and the younger people together, trying to keep those who live in rural areas together with those who live in cities is one of the most important and most noble tasks of politicians these days.

Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.