Sociologist Quotes

In this loveless everyday life eroticism is a substitute for love.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Design is people.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.

There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God.

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

Leadership does not depend on being right.

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't.

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.

So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

Right now, we have no possibility of politics because we have a one-party state.

Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.

My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.

My business is the analytical framework.

My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.