Quotes · Skopia

36 quotes

Ethnocentrism is the...view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it...Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.

William Graham Sumner

Folkways · 1906

★ 1.7

Sociology

The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us... The very development of American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.

Michael Harrington

The Other America · 1962

★ 1.7

Sociology

In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody-in the guise of personal "growth" and "awareness"-the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse.

Christopher Lasch

The Culture of Narcissism · 1979

★ 1.7

Sociology · Historical literature

Where torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.

William Graham Sumner

1906

★ 1.8

Essay · Sociology

We are all of us, men and women both, the creatures of culture: We do and feel what our societies want us to do and feel, and the demands that they put upon us are not always either very consistent or very precisely correlated with biology.

Diana Trilling

1970

★ 1.8

Essay · Sociology

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which, both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public.

Francis Bacon

Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral · 1625

★ 1.9

Sociology

Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.

Jane Addams

1910

★ 1.9

Sociology · Economic literature

These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the scriptural parable, the bland lead the bland.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Affluent Society · 1958

★ 1.9

Sociology

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Matthew Arnold

Culture and Anarchy · 1869

★ 1.9

Sociology · Economic literature

The dog... Commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as a thing of good repute.

Thorstein Veblen

1899

★ 1.9

Sociology

Ideal conversation is an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.

Emily Post

1922

★ 1.9

Sociology

By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.

C. Wright Mills

The Power Elite · 1956

★ 2.5

Sociology

The mores come down to us from the past. Each individual is born into them as he is born into the atmosphere, and he does not reflect on them, or criticise them any more than a baby analyzes the atmosphere before he begins to breathe it.

William Graham Sumner

Folkways · 1906

★ 3.4

Sociology

If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.

William Graham Sumner

Folkways · 1906

★ 3.4

Sociology

This book is about the organization man...The people I am talking about...are not the workers, nor are they the white-collar people in the usual, clerk sense of the word. These people only work for the Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well.

William H. Whyte

The Organization Man · 1956

★ 3.4

Sociology

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

Guy Debord

The Society of the Spectacle · 1967

★ 3.4

Sociology

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhautible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Joseph Campbell

1949

★ 3.5

Sociology

Believe it or not-and I know that most people do not-violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence.

Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined · 2011

★ 3.5

Sociology · Economic literature

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Affluent Society · 1958

★ 3.6

Sociology · Economic literature

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

Thorstein Veblen

1899

★ 3.7

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