Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
My students often ask me, 'What is sociology?' And I tell them, 'It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see.'
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.
I have an economics degree with a minor in sociology. The reason I have that is because I want to do a ministry in urban areas and help with underprivileged kids.
My first semester of college, I'm going to sociology and English and psychology, and all I cared about was getting home and preparing for whatever audition I had.
At 19, while studying at St Xavier's College and majoring in literature and sociology, I got my first job as a copywriter. It was at a company called the Script Shop.
Design, to me, is part psychology, part sociology, and part magic. A good decorator should know what's going on in someone's marriage and how their kids are doing in school.
The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism.
Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.
Already I notice a feeling of 'If this be sociology, Good Lord deliver us.' However sociology has endured many things like it and my faith in its ultimate triumph never wavers.
In sociology, they call it 'code switching.' I can feel just as comfortable in a room full of people who don't look like me because I understand the social cues of class and race.
I was in an interdisciplinary major - which was a new thing then - which was psychology, sociology, anthropology, and biology, which is really sort of the study of the human being.
I love seeing what people are eating. It's a great way of looking at what is similar and what is different about people. It's sociology and anthropology and history rolled into one.
I studied philosophy and ended on sociology. For some reason, all the advanced courses in philosophy were offered 4:30 to 6:30, so I could never go because of football, so I had to switch.
All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.
Don't settle; don't compromise. Freeze your eggs, get your sociology doctorate, worry more about war and pestilence and the incredible inequality of geographical birth than finding your soulmate.
Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline - sociology - as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals.
I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.
I majored in sociology and never took a single music-related course, much less any kind of class in public speaking - no confidence for it, none - yet I still had a passion for it that burned inside me.
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Policy makers, like most people, normally feel that they already know all the psychology and all the sociology they are likely to need for their decisions. I don't think they are right, but that's the way it is.
Sociology is really in trouble as a field. I can tell you, because I've known young people who have wanted to go into it, and they have been uniformly advised, if you are a free thinker, stay away from sociology.
That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.
Architects feel empowered to give opinions about politics and sociology and philosophy without knowing much about it. Kind of in the same way that they think they can design furniture or fashion or utensils for dining.
I was a sociology major. And it had nothing to do necessarily with law, which is ultimately - I went to law school. But what I tried to do was choose something that I was passionate about or something that I cared about.
Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.
Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.
One of the key places where sociology should be used is in analyzing 'the world' of our times, so that we can be more discerning. To resist the dangers of the world, you have to recognize the distortions and seductions of the world.
Rich people never go to war. You ask a college kid to go to war, and he's like, 'Umm, I'm taking this sociology class, and I think war is, like, really stupid, and my roommate's, like, half Afghani, so it's going to cause some static.'
The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.
I met my wife Anne who was a sociology student, and her influence together with activities associated with the student movement of the time opened up my interests amongst other things into the theatre, art, music, politics and philosophy.
To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.
My favorite subjects were astronomy, sociology, and gender studies. And I always loved math class; I have a thing for numbers. I played soccer freshman year and then realized I hate sweating, but looking back, I definitely should have kept up with sports.
My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I'd be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don't think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.
There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.
I had always looked down on sociology as this arriviste discipline. It didn't have the noble history of English and history as a subject. But once I had a little exposure to it, I said, 'Hey, here's the key. Here's the key to understanding life and all its forms.'
Look, nobody is born with a sociology degree, and no one can understand all perspectives. Nobody's going to get it all from the very start. But the Internet at least allows everyone to hear these perspectives at a much faster rate than if we had to do it without it.
Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.
Once upon a time, I was morbidly sensitive about the impertinence born of sociology. Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark; white girls jogged to keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber street lamps. Part of me didn't blame them, but most of me was hurt.
Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.
I was in school studying International Studies and Sociology. I was really into what was going on in school. I was affected by the ideas and engaged as a student, but not disciplined or motivated enough to do the work. That was a fear of mine for a while, that nothing was motivating.
Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.
The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the law, the civil service and the private sector.
I think that's the most important part of doing this job, is learning different personality types. I mean, it's kind of like sociology or psychology in a sense. With that, and with every project I do, I think I'm able to pull something away that further makes me understand humanity in a way I didn't before.
I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.