Social Understanding Quotes

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.

You get more churches burned down in the United States in the last two years than in the last hundred, because of the lack of understanding of culture and diversity and the beauty of it.

The arts capture our insecurities, quicken our instincts, guide us through threats. They help us know ourselves. They help us know each other. They help us know better.

Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.

When we simply write a place off as, like, 'Well, it's just Trump country,' for the people who are there, we do them a disservice on some level. It's their country, too.

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

A deep appreciation for politics comes from empathy for our fellow human beings and their diverse paths through life.

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

The study of history is in the truest sense an education, and a training for political life.

By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.

We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.

The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.

Lots of people with little kids or babies with Down syndrome tell me they aren't afraid of the future for their child because of what I am doing to help people understand it better.

Prison opened my eyes to so many things. It was a great time. I met interesting people. I got to understand the behaviour of the police and the media. I am an observer of the human race.

I take it as a real compliment that people believe that I can in some ways mine the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the somewhat off-center - psychologically speaking - people in our society, and bring a real humanity to them, and make people see what would otherwise be a person that you would hate. Find a reason to love them and see the world from their point of view.

I certainly have gay friends, but I don't remember thinking, 'Oh my God, I have this friend, and they're gay, and that's so cool.' I mean, I was very naive until I got to a certain age.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

I feel quite sure that what the American people lack is knowledge.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

Everybody knows what's going on. Even if they don't watch it they know what's happening.

People are born with the ability to make judgments. And they can't help but use the information they have to divine something about the world they're in. Making categorical judgments, in large, helps our society.

I'm interested in everything about people. Not just, 'what do you do for a living?' but I want to know about their fears and sadnesses and listen to their regrets, both sides of it, the happy and the sad.

We all have the same needs. So it's immoral to make snap judgments about people.

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.