Leon Michel Gambetta Quotes

Write about society as news and treat it like sociology.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

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.

There are families of every kind. I think a lot of people are struggling to make sense of their identity in a very complicated world.

Science of Society

The structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals

Society is one word, but many things.

I tend to write society as I see and understand it.

Many of the people I know and that you know are very complex human beings, and it's not all about race. Everything isn't a question of race. Everything isn't a question of economics at the very base level.

Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

I am not struck so much by the diversity of testimony as by the many-sidedness of truth.

I think doing period piece is easier, because after a certain distance, everybody is equal, I think. The relative contemporary is harder. I think that's the way it is.

Ours is a colourful and diversified world. It is also a complex one.

The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.

The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

I am a sociologist, God help me.

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.

We live in an increasingly sophisticated world that makes it difficult to make simple comments on stuff. There are too many people on both sides of the border who are taking advantage of circumstances and the situation.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

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.

Sometimes people who want to understand Haiti from a political perspective may be missing part of the picture. They also need to look at Haiti from a psychological perspective.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

I admit that the eyes of the intellectually and culturally lively tend to glaze over at the mere mention of sociology, often with ample justification.