Sourced and curated.

Folkways · 1906

★ 1.7

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

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.

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.

1906

★ 1.8

Essay · Sociology

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

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

Jane Addams

1910

★ 1.9

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Folkways · 1906

★ 3.4

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.

Folkways · 1906

★ 3.4

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thorstein Veblen

1899

★ 3.7

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... One feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivngs; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The Souls of Black Folk · 1903

★ 3.7

The Negro folk-song-the rhythmic cry of the slave-stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

The Souls of Black Folk · 1903

★ 3.7

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.

1900

★ 3.8

To do exactly as your neighbors do is the only sensible rule.

Emily Post

1922

★ 3.8

Essay · Sociology

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

Sociology · 1881

★ 4.3

A differentiation arises between ourselves, the we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others-groups, out-groups.

Folkways · 1906

★ 4.3

It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The Affluent Society · 1958

★ 4.4

The men, women, and children who compose a society at any time are the unconscious depositaries and transmitters of the mores. They inherited them without knowing it; they are molding them unconsciously; they will transmit them involuntarily. The people cannot make the mores. They are made by them.

To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination... After the racist statues are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.

Folkways · 1906

★ 5.0

Sociology · Political literature

Michael Harrington

The Other America · 1962

★ 5.1

Sociology · Political literature

For the middle class, the police protect property, give directions, and help old ladies. For the urban poor, the police are those who arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.

Michael Harrington

The Other America · 1962

★ 5.1

There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities · 1961

★ 5.2

"Beauty" is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

Naomi Wolf

The Beauty Myth · 1990

★ 5.2

In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.

Thorstein Veblen

The Theory of the Leisure Class · 1899

★ 5.3

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

The Souls of Black Folk · 1903

★ 5.5

God at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.

Sigmund Freud

Totem and Taboo · 1913

★ 5.5