Sociologist Quotes

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. (Iris Murdoch)
No sociologist, for instance, should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. View quote
Max Weber
If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea. View quote
Saul Alinsky
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. View quote
Edward Bernays
Economics is harder than physics; luckily it is not quite as hard as sociology. Why is economics such a hard subject? Part of the answer has to do with complexity. The economy cannot be put in a box. [...] Another reason economics is hard is that the critical sociologist is right: it involves human beings, who do not behave in simple, mechanical ways. View quote
Paul Krugman
Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, observed that elites in a society typically maintain their power not simply by controlling the means of production (ie money), but by dominating the cultural discourse too (ie a society's intellectual map). And what is most important in relation to that cognitive map is not what is overtly stated and discussed – but what is left unstated, or ignored. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
Well, I certainly was not going to study physics, and I knew I was not going to study biology, but I could have become a sociologist or an anthropologist. However, I found sociology a little soft. I think that somewhere in my mind, I probably already had the notion – which turned out to be right – that if I was going to be a social scientist of some kind, I would like a rigorous social science. The analytical aspect of economics already appealed to me. That must have been so. It was not really a matter of chance. But if my wife had said ‘oh, no, economics was terribly boring', I would probably have found something else to do. View quote
Robert Solow
When, then, the sociologist undertakes the investigation of some order of social facts, he must endeavour to consider them from an aspect that is independent of their individual manifestations. View quote
Émile Durkheim
It is not so much that he was an American sociologist... as it was that he determined what American sociology would be... What made Paul unique was not his involvement with ideas or his involvement with people, but his ability to stir the two together. View quote
James Samuel Coleman
The sociologist permits himself to see only what is acceptable to his colleagues. (Marshall McLuhan)
Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was my own; product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand. View quote
John Fowles
The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist. View quote
Daniel Bell
Over this landscape, Göran Therborn's Between Sex and Power rises up like some majestic volcano. Throwing up a billowing column of ideas and arguments, while a lava of evidence flows down its slopes, this is a great work of historical intellect and imagination, the effect of a rare combination of gifts. Trained as a sociologist, Therborn is a highly conceptual thinker, allying the formal rigour of his discipline at its best, with command of a vast range of empirical data. The result is a powerful theoretical structure, supported by a fascinating body of evidence. But it is also a set of macro-narratives that compose perhaps the first true example of a work of global history we possess. View quote
Perry Anderson
I would like to make clear that I speak only of sensations. I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like. View quote
Michelangelo Antonioni
"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” asked Henry II as he instigated the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170. Down through the ages, presidents and princes around the world have been murderers and accessories to murder, as the great Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden documented in statistical detail in their masterwork Power and Morality. One of their main findings was that the behavior of ruling groups tends to be more criminal and amoral than that of the people over whom they rule. View quote
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Perhaps some little boys consumed with curiosity to watch their maiden aunts in the bathroom later become inveterate sociologists. This is quite uninteresting. What interests us is the curiosity that grips any sociologist in front of a closed door behind which there are human voices. View quote
Peter L. Berger
Like [John] Wesley, the sociologist will have to confess that his parish is the world. View quote
Peter L. Berger
God knows, I'm hardly a sociologist. But I hope in the future for some form of reconciliation. Because I think all men are guilty. I'm not talking about rape and pillage. I'm not talking about Harveyesque. I'm talking about all of the spectrum. From an aggressive flirt. Or even just a flirty-flirt that has one sour note in it. Or what I think every man was guilty of, some form of omission in attitude, in his views. Are we really going to have only capital punishment? Because right now, that's what we have. You get accused, you're obliterated. Charlie Rose ceases to exist. View quote
Barry Diller
I am whole-heartedly in favour of the profession learning more about the history of [information transfer]. We have a tendency to focus on the newest forms of information provision ... neglecting the continued existence and continuing importance of all the previous forms... But our profession is not that of the historian (or sociologist or philosopher) interesting as their work may be. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
A bigot is simply a sociologist without credentials. (Dinesh D'Souza)
I once asked my father what he wanted me to be. To my horror, he said, 'sociologist.' View quote
Marianne Faithfull
My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion. View quote
Carmen Busquets
I am a sociologist, God help me. View quote
John O'Neill
Football brings out the sociologist that lurks in some otherwise respectable citizens. They say football is a metaphor for America's sinfulness. View quote
George Will