Durkheim Suicide Quotes & Sayings

Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it. — Emile Durkheim

Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie - Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.63 (It means, literally, "normlessness.") We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago. — Jonathan Haidt

Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon. — Emile Durkheim

No man can do a great and enduring work for God who is not a man of prayer, and no man can be a man of prayer who does not give much time to praying. — Edward McKendree Bounds

The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result — Emile Durkheim

When there is no other aim but to outstrip constantly the point arrived at, how painful to be thrown back!...Since imagination is hungry for novelty, and ungoverned, it gropes at random — Emile Durkheim

He missed her all over his body — John Green

Melancholy suicide. - This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract; — Emile Durkheim

My fighting gospel is T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I am never without it. — Vo Nguyen Giap

And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight. — Guillermo Del Toro

In the nineteenth century, one hundred years before a country called Qatar existed, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, wrote of "anomic suicide." It's what happens when a society's moral underpinnings are shaken. And they can be shaken, Durkheim believed, both by great disaster and by great fortune. — Eric Weiner

If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as "social gains", if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as "selfish greed". — Ayn Rand

Roger lay in the dust of the road, bruised, filthy, and starving, with a woman trembling and weeping against his chest, now and then giving him a small thump with her fist. He had never felt happier in his life. — Diana Gabaldon

Maniacal suicide. - This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc. — Emile Durkheim

As they say: A baking man will grasp at a hangman. Whoever gets the job will be dragged into the heat, forced to wear a massive pair of iron shoes, and frogmarched across the minefield at gunpoint. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko