Emile Durkheim Quotes

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

Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

Religion is the worst thing that ever happened to mankind - the ironic part is that it's presented as a good thing, and its effect is absolutely catastrophic to individuals and to societies.

It has made mincemeat of Barack Obama's pose of thoughtfulness. It has demonstrated that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities. It has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism.

Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

We live in this irreparably broken world, and I don't wish to deny reality, but the amazing thing to me is not that we refuse to relinquish hope as a species. The amazing thing is that we're right to hold on to hope. The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy. ... Obviously not all stories end happily. We don't always have good fortune, but hope gives us, as a species and as individuals, what we otherwise wouldn't have: A chance.

In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.

What we live is what we believe. Everything else is just so much religious talk.

Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe the past is nicer than the present. It isn't. Or wasn't. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

Miss America gets a lot of flak, but the reality is that it is uplifting and aspirational - 50% percent of my points were based on talent.

If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.

Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality.

Time has nothing to do with the matter.

Toleration ought in reality to be merely a transitory mood. It must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to affront.

People are like birds - from a distance, beautiful: from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.

Something cannot be made out of nothing. Nor can something be made to go back to nothing.

Where these reduced (operational - E.W.) concepts govern the analysis of the human reality, individual or social, mental or material, they arrive at a false concreteness - a concreteness isolated from the conditions which constitute its reality. In this context, the operational treatment of the concept assumes a political function. The individual and his behavior are analyzed in a therapeutic sense - adjustment to his society. Thought and expression, theory and practice are to be brought in line with the facts of his existence without leaving room for the conceptual critique of these facts.

There are idiots. Look around.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ...Literature"

At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.

They that censure, should practice. Or else let them have the first stone, and the last too.

The following story is one which he related recently regarding the practice of fault - finding among creeds: A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. . . .

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be, all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.