Sociology & Sociologists Quotes

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

All civilizations must go through four stages: The first stage is the emergence of a new civilization and society. The second stage covers a period of growth and prosperity. Stagnation and decadence characterize the third stage where wealth can no longer increase. This brings us to a fourth stage of decline leading to the ultimate collapse. Finally, a new civilization emerges from the ashes of the previous one and another cycle is born. The conditions of the world, and of the nations do not persist in one unchanging state but are transformed with the passage of time and move from one condition to another

Such forms of wealth as gold, silver, precious stones are only minerals and products having an exchange value. It is social effort, the search for profit and the use of tools that cause the increase or decrease of the quantity of precious metals in circulation and hence, the real wealth of a King

Freedom to breed Is intolerable…. People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation.

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

Science of Society

[Should we] pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism”?

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

Because of the demand for luxury articles, they become customary, and thus come to be necessities

What images do we see from the rest of the world? We see natural disasters, war, terror. We see refugees, and we see horrible diseases. Right? We see beautiful beaches, cute animals, beautiful nature, cultural rites and stuff. And then we're supposed to make the connection in our head and create a worldview out of this. And how is that possible?

Individualism, one of the great achievements of Western civilization, is now accompanied more and more by such phenomena as fragmentation, solitude, egocentricity and the disintegration of solidarity

People who, whether they inhabit the desert or settled areas and cities, live a life of abundance and have all the good things to eat, die more quickly than others when a drought or famine comes upon them

A large civilization yields large profits [earnings] because of' the large amount of [available] labor which is the cause of profit.

Nations and races change with the change of periods and the passage of time.

In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.

What is sudden for one person may not be sudden at all for another; eclipses of the sun occur “suddenly” for the ignorant but by no means for the astronomer. The same thing applies to revolutions: those political “catastrophes” happen “suddenly” for the ignorant and, the great majority of self-satisfied philistines, but very often they are by no means sudden for the man who understands the social phenomena surrounding him.

In the twentieth century, the essence of man is not that he is a rational, or a political, or a sinful, or a thinking animal, but that he is an industrial animal. It is not his moral or intellectual or social or aesthetic ... attributes which make man what he is. His essence resides in his capacity to contribute to, and to profit from, industrial society. The emergence of industrial society is the prime concern of sociology.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

Hoarding money is not like hoarding grain or food supplies. Moses' advice to the Pharaoh was the right advice for the dark years of Egypt. The Pharaoh had to store up in the seven good years to tide one over for the seven bad years. Egypt needed huge stocks of grain and staples to help its people pull through a severe drought. The ultimate reserve fund for a king is a healthy, vibrant and skilled population

Half the experimental physicists studied and fully 84 percent of the theoreticians were the sons of professional men, typically engineers, physicians, and teachers …. None of the fathers … were the sons of unskilled laborers.

Among the Gauls there are subdivisions, not only in every nation, and in every district and village, but almost in every house, every one must fly to some patron for protection.

Are we really certain that the mechanism of society, like the mechanism of the heavenly bodies or the mechanism of the human body, is subject to general laws? Are we really certain that it is a harmoniously organized whole? Or is it not true that what is most notable in society is the absence of all order?

Sociology almost always dominates technology. Ideas often lie unused because people do not want to use them.

Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.