Sociologist Quotes

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.

As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.

Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.

I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.

The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.