Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.
I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.
The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organisations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production.
Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.
Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.
One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism
Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.
Throughout early modernity there were very strong pressures on Jews to assimilate. Assimilating meant cutting your ties with the community of origin.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.
... a supportive husband is an absolute requirement for professional women.... He is something she looks for, and when she finds him, she marries him.
I don't think teachers read the textbooks. And I don't think adoption committees read the textbooks before they adopt them. I think they look at them.
Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.
One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism.
...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.
When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.
That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.
The blessing which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent.
India is the most religious country in the world, Sweden is the most secular country in the world, and America is a country of Indians ruled by Swedes.
The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations.
The Bible provides unity without imposing uniformity, without prohibiting change; it is a standing invitation to thinking and to take responsibilities.
A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.
This dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.
The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.
What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.
All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.
Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.
Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.
If a socialist economy is opened up to increasing degrees of market forces, a point will be reached at which democratic governance becomes a possibility.
The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.
The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.
The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.
Thus, in general, in the first instance, the direction of interest in empirical fact will be canalised by the logical structure of the theoretical system.
In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.
So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.
Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
When people think, rightly or wrongly, that marriage is forever, they are stimulated to seek and find a resolution, a modus vivendi, whenever they quarrel.
With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.
The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.
By definition, sacred beings are separated beings. That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane beings.
Behind every rational and irrational force in human society there is a social mechanism which determines where it is to appear and what forms it is to take.
But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.
Now obviously the propositions of the system have reference to matters of empirical fact; if they did not, they could have no claim to be called scientific.
The Negro does not want love. He wants justice . . . I believe it would be better for the Negro's soul to be seared with hate than dwarfed by self-abasement.