Quotes & Sayings About Sociologists

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English. — Bill Bryson

I know I can be accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of a novel about love or pirates. But I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists and historians who write in code. — Eduardo Galeano

Sociologists of regulation - such people exist - talk about something called 'regulatory capture'. This is the process whereby a state regulator ends up promoting the interests of the industry it is supposed to monitor, at the expense of the public interest. It can happen for a number of reasons, and many of them are very human. For example, if you work in the technical business o f drug approval and pharmacovigilance, who can you chat to about your day's work? To your partner, it's all baffling and pedantic; but to the people in the regulatory affairs division of the companies you work with every day, they understand. You have so much in common with them. So industry bodies - not even necessarily the pharmaceutical companies themselves - might offer things as intangible as friendship, and opportunities to socialize. — Ben Goldacre

None of these classy locutions mean anything different from the simpler ones they replace. They work ceremonially, not semantically. Writing in a classy way to sound smart means writing to sound like, maybe even be, a certain kind of person. Sociologists, and other scholars, do that because they think (or hope) that being the right kind of person will persuade others to accept what they say as a persuasive social science argument. — Howard S. Becker

Time studies find that a mother, especially one who works outside the home for pay, is among the most time-poor humans on the planet, especially single mothers, weighed down not only by role overload but also what sociologists call "task density" - the intense responsibility she bears and the multitude of jobs she performs in each of those roles.6 — Brigid Schulte

And intellectual world or by political and financial elites. Hence they must set aside their contempt for other disciplines and their absurd claim to greater scientific legitimacy, despite the fact that they know almost nothing about anything. This, in any case, is the charm of the discipline and of the social sciences in general: one starts from square one, so that there is some hope of making major progress. In France, I believe, economists are slightly more interested in persuading historians and sociologists, as well as people outside the academic world, that what they are doing is interesting (although they are not always successful — Anonymous

Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus. — Peter S. Prescott

What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government. — George Orwell

Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule. — Robert K. Merton

Sociologists and anthropologists tell us that religion has three dimensions: creed, code, and cult; or words, works, and worship; or theology, morality, and liturgy. — Peter Kreeft

In a way, all sociologists are akin to Marxists because of their inclination to settle everyone's accounts but their own. — Raymond Aron

I'm not a sociologist, I'm not a political scientist, but I'm a fairly intuitive person. — Anthony Scaramucci

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. — Russell Baker

I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation. — Anthony Burgess

It is not sociologists who provide insights but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very center of their times. I have always felt strongly that this was the photographer's true vocation. — Brassai

What a growing number of sociologists have found ought to be common sense: by locking millions of people out of the mainstream legal economy, by making it difficult or impossible for people to find housing or feed themselves, and by destroying familial bonds by warehousing millions for minor crimes, we make crime more - not less - likely in the most vulnerable communities. — Michelle Alexander

A system where self-employment and self-finance was typical gave way to a system of companies having various business freedoms and enabling institutions. This was the 'great transformation' on which historians and sociologists as well as business commentators were to write volumes. — Edmund Phelps

A sociologist without an archive is like a person without a memory. — Raisa Gorbacheva

I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a Camel will force children to become lifelong smokers. — Jonah Goldberg

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts. — Neil Postman

To call the population of strangers in the midst of which we live "society" is such a usurpation that even the sociologists wonder if they should abandon a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names like "colleague," "contact," "buddy," acquaintance," or "date." Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity. — The Invisible Committee

Had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins — George Orwell

The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding. — Albion W. Small

Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers. — Thomas Piketty

Sociologists say that going to the movies is a bonding experience. It probably has to do with the way you feet stick to the floor. — Robert Orben

I'm pleased that some economists and sociologists are beginning to talk about, for example, alternative measures of human well-being - alternative, that is, to GDP, on which the world runs. — John Sulston

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery. — Terence McKenna

There are relatively few atheists among neurologists and brain surgeons and astrophysicists, but many among psychologists, sociologists, and historians. The reason seems obvious: the first study divine design, the second study human undesign. — Peter Kreeft

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months. — Tom Robbins

I have friends, political scientists, sociologists, who all share an interest at least in certain kinds of science fiction. — Paul Krugman

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages. — Evgeny Morozov

It is becoming fashionable to scorn the idea of sin in society. The impact of humanistic thinking is to belittle the concept that man is corrupt. Psychologists and psychiatrists would persuade us that people really are not responsible for their wrongs. Rather, the view of sociologists is that the environment is all wrong.
Their cry is, 'Change society and you will get better men and women'. It simply does not happen.
Christ's call is, 'Change men and women and you will get a better society'. This does work. It always has. — W. Phillip Keller

The breakdown of the wall separating marriage from nonmarriage has been described by some legal historians and sociologists as the deinstitutionalization or delegalization of marriage or even, with a French twist, as demariage. I like historian Nancy Cott's observation that it is akin to what happened in Europe and America when legislators disestablished their state religion. — Stephanie Coontz

Sociologists tell us that even the most introverted individual will influence ten thousand other people during his or her lifetime! This amazing statistic was shared with me by my associate Tim Elmore. — John C. Maxwell

Thus, sociologists place these two factors - pleasure and meaning - among the first factors associated with "subjective well-being. — Frederic Lenoir

The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle. As sociologists Paula Fornby and Andrew Cherlin found, a "growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families." For — J.D. Vance

These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle. — Allan Bloom

In 1975, another landmark paper showed that mothers presiding over an empty nest were not despairing, as conventional wisdom had always assumed, but happier than mothers who still had children at home; during the eighties, as women began their great rush into the workforce, sociologists generally concluded that while work was good for women's well-being, children tended to negate its positive effects. — Jennifer Senior

One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between "concepts." There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience... Sociology - by its very nature? - seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died — Peter Elbow

If there's a distinction between men and women, I don't pay attention to it. Honestly, I don't see it. I think all of us are part feminine and part masculine. I'm sure sociologists can come up with distinctions about what's different between men and women, but for every example you can give about what a woman does, you can come up with an opposite example of other women who don't do that. Those are more artificial distinctions, I think. — Wayne Dyer

Sociologists say a neighbourhood is perceived as gay if anywhere between 15 to 25 percent of the residents are homosexual. — Christopher Bram

There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. If there are half a billion Chinese Christians fifty years from now, that will change the course of human history.6 In most cases, the Christianity that is growing is not the more secularized, belief-thin versions predicted by the sociologists. Rather, it is a robust supernaturalist kind of faith, with belief in miracles, Scriptural authority, and personal conversion. — Timothy Keller

What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more pragmatic about the methods that we are using instead of pretending that we have our own scientific apparatus with very sophisticated mathematic models that distinguish us from sociologists and historians. — Thomas Piketty

We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry. — Denise Scott Brown

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. — Peter L. Berger

Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge - a common understanding - likemindedness as the sociologists say. — John Dewey

Comedians are sociologists. We're pointing out stuff that the general public doesn't even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see. — Steven Wright

...for recent sociologists the dark secret at the heart of modern individualism is its failure as a mode of life... — Lee Patterson

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless. — Michio Kaku

Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians? — Peter Berger

Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original. Sociologists — Adam M. Grant

Buying is an activity understood by economists. Shopping is a phenomenon of interest to anthropologists and sociologists. — Marc Gobe

All the electronic devices are weakening the social bonds. Sociologists and psychologists should study this serious threat instead of repeating that communication is the cement of society. — Mario Bunge

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists. — Eric Schlosser

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone. — Noam Chomsky

When modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there. And that is becoming more and more the situation ... Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion. — G.K. Chesterton

Sociologists well understand that chaos at home causes violent behavior, educational failure and social alienation among children. Yet, many of us in America stay far, far away from this topic. That in itself is a national scandal. Bad parenting is gravely harming this nation. — Bill O'Reilly

Any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconsious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell, especially on sociologists. — Marshall McLuhan

Sociologists keep the rationality hypothesis of the consumer away and replace it in the heart of social relations and strengths in which it is taken. — David Abikzir

Probably the only people left who think that economics deserves a Nobel Prize are economists. It confirms their conceit that they're doing 'science' rather than the less tidy task of observing the world and trying to make sense of it. This, after all, is done by mere historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and (heaven forbid) even journalists. Economists are loath to admit that they belong in such raffish company. — Robert J. Samuelson

We come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing ... We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say that everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature. — Neil Postman

The place where french-postmodernism has been really harmful is the Third World. Because Third World intellectuals are badly needed in popular movements, they can make contributions. And a lot of them is drawn away from this: antropologists, sociologists and others. They are drawn away in this arcane, and in my view, mostly meaningless discourses and are disassociated from popular struggles. And you can see the impact. They really indicate that the level of irrationality that grows out of this undermines the oportunities for doing something really significant and important. It is like consumerism because it diverts people from concentrating in a serious way and doing something about their own problems. — Noam Chomsky

What can we surmise about the likelihood of someone's being caring and generous, loving and helpful, just from knowing that they are a believer? Virtually nothing, say psychologists, sociologists, and others who have studied that question for decade — Alfie Kohn

The angry reaction supports the academic literature on Appalachian Americans. In a December 2000 paper, sociologists Carol A. Markstrom, Sheila K. Marshall, and Robin J. Tryon found that avoidance and wishful-thinking forms of coping "significantly predicted resiliency" among Appalachian teens. Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly. We — J.D. Vance

In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Being a sociologist means never having to be bored — Randall Collins

Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and filmmakers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrators and their well-groomed spouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham's puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener's rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. — Albert Wendt

And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality'. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. — Doris Lessing

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also. — John Updike

Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we're working more. We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time. — Pico Iyer

These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century. — Miguel De Unamuno

Speaking generally, however, when you interact with someone else, you are doing outer work (physical time, play time, connecting time) ... as many sociologists have pointed out, this area of life used to dominate everyday existence, at a time when families sat around the fire of an evening and ate every meal together.
That's no longer true. Families today are often loose constellations. Contact is intermittent and rushed. everyone has their own space. Activity is scattered all around town, not confined to the home. Cars have made everyone mobile, but central heating may be the most powerful force in shaping modern society. — Deepak Chopra

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns. — Michelle Alexander

Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives. — Shashi Tharoor

Technicians are triply invisible. First, they have traditionally been invisible to historians and sociologists of science. . . . Second, they have been largely, if not entirely, invisible in the formal documentary record produced by scientific practitioners. Even when one is committed to doing so, it is extremely difficult to retrieve information about who they were and what they did. Third, technicians have arguably been invisible as relevant actors to those persons in control of the workplaces in which scientific knowledge is produced. . . . Technicians have been "not there" in roughly the same sense that servants were, and were supposed to be, "not there" with respect to the conversations of Victorian domestic employers. — Clifford D. Conner

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage. — Timothy Keller

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call accumulative advantage. — Malcolm Gladwell

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all 'Damned Things' is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this 'Damned Thing' into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into the slot assigned it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychologist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the 'Damned Thing' will not fit into their slots. — Robert Anton Wilson

The same principle held in black universities, where students demanded more and more black teachers. White professors who had virtually dedicated their lives and their academic careers as historians, anthropologists, sociologists, to the problems of racism and its cures, thinking they did this for the good of the oppressed victims of racism (and often suffering social and academic insults as a result), were asked to leave schools in favor of black teachers. Some of them turned very bitter. — John Howard Griffin

Sociologists have a theory of the looking-glass self: You become what the most important person in your life (wife, father, boss, etc.) thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees? — Philip Yancey

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. — Richard Wall

I don't consider myself a sociologist, I consider myself a filmmaker, among other things. Maybe an asshole but a filmmaker. — Melvin Van Peebles

One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption-rational utility maximization-that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists. — Lester Thurow

Do you know what nearly all the sociologists say today in their study of young people? The greatest problem facing young people today is not sex - it is boredom. — Billy Graham

Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists ... sociologists often cannot even understand each other. — Kenneth E. Boulding

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training. — Jan Chipchase