Sociology Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old sociology quotes, sociology sayings, and sociology proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

As a general rule people ask for advice only in order not to follow it or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it. Alexandre Dumas
Every individual is representative of the whole and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology. Anais Nin
Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this. C. Wright Mills
The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. C. Wright Mills
The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized cooperation. Charles Cooley
We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low grade idiot. Charles Cooley
The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain. Daniel Bell
It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man since it is only in the course of history that he is formed. Emile Durkheim
The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society. Fulton J. Sheen
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. George Stigler
Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Graham Greene
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more. Isaac Asimov
If it's far away, it's news, but if it's close at home, it's sociology. James Reston
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent. Jostein Gaarder
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong. Karl Popper
Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective. Kenneth Pike
That is the paradox of the epidemic that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first. Malcolm Gladwell
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it. Nadine Gordimer
It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people. Nikki Giovanni
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. Oscar Wilde
The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture. Peter L. Berger
The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood. Pierre Bourdieu
I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks. Pierre Bourdieu
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong. KARL R.
Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up. Stephen King
Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it. Steven Pressfield
Sociology should be thought of as a science of action of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action. Talcott Parsons
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department. Thomas Sowell
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form. Toni Morriso
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology. W. H. Auden