Sourced and curated.

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

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

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

Sociology · Political literature

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.

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

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.

William Graham Sumner

Folkways · 1906

★ 5.0

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

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.

William Graham Sumner

Sociology · 1881

★ 4.3

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

William Graham Sumner

Folkways · 1906

★ 4.3

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

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

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

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