I like to go to Starbucks and watch the intellectuals. I observe them and their intellectualness. They in turn observe me drinking coffee and being a creeper.

It’s daft, locking us up,” said Nanny. “I’d have had us killed.””That’s because you’re basically good,” said Magrat. “The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.

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.

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

Love abounds where more attention is paid to your value and less to your shortcomings

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

False fears are a plague, a modern plague!

Rich is my word for someone who can afford to make choices, who has enough resources to do more than merely survive.

Pour la majorité des gens, le physique compte en amitié et même pour les relations les plus élémentaires….je parle de cette chose si vague et si importante que l’on nomme physionomie. AU premier coup d’oeil,...

The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn’t it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it...

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one’s ability to learn something new that...

We don’t live in a world that suffers from doubt, but one that suffers from certainty, false certainties that compensate for the well of worldly anxieties and worries.

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.

We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.

El hombre depresivo es el animal laborans que se explota a sí mismo voluntariamente, sin coacción externa.

For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not...

In the savage horde the most vagabond, as well as in the most civilized nations of Europe, man is only what he is made to be by external circumstances; he is necessarily elevated by his...

Lefebvre summarises this march of clock-time through society and nature (1991: 95–6). He argues that the lived time experienced in and through nature has gradually disappeared. Time is no longer something that is visible and...

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents...

Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It’s unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws...

What all of this suggests is that we need a more complex understandingof identities. If we identify on the basis of race, class, sexuality, orgender alone we cannot make sense of the ways these identificationscombine...

The social phenomenon of economic growth is, thanks to the principle of the conservation of matter, nothing other than the physical phenomenon of increasing resource depletion.

Social change doesn’t happen overnight: It takes decades for momentum to build and for the once-radical edge to become mainstream.

Power, it seems, is one of those terms we all understand and can explain–until asked to do so.

Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith...

Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We...

One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it...

By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my...

individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by...

Perhaps the difference between a professor and a bus driver is that the professor can say stupid things with complete authority while the bus driver is not authorized to make brilliant insights.

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

Many ancient (and contemporary) societies considered the sexually awakened femaleas both auspicious and dangerous.

I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty—to one’s friends and one’s family and one’s caste.

They were sorting, or classifying. It’s easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act...

I am successful because of my brains and my guts, put together, and I don’t need some fancy-ass degree from a bunch of sweater-vest-wearing pricks who haven’t gotten laid since Bush Senior was president… Do...

In today’s society conformity is more of a necessity than an option.

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

Is this World a reality or just a Human perceptions?

I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

Ser radical é tomar as coisas pela raiz. Mas, para o homem, a raiz é o próprio homem.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the...

If we watch the interactions between human beings, we will receive a graduate-level education.

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith...

One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts–they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.

When modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accommodating one’s self to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not...

Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don’t know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.

On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion… None quite voice the thought, but those...

It’s my choice to be beautiful. It’s my choice to be ugly. And it’s my choice to decided what those words actually mean.

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture...