100 Sociological Quotes
Following is our list of sociological quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about social science.
Quick Jump To
Famous Sociological Quotes
Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this? — C. Wright Mills
With sociology one can do anything and call it work — Malcolm Bradbury
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of. — Zygmunt Bauman
The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden. — Pierre Bourdieu
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise. — C. Wright Mills
The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood. — Pierre Bourdieu
Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history. — Todd Gitlin
Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member. — George H. Mead
I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks. — Pierre Bourdieu
Man, the molecule of society, is the subject of social science. — Henry Charles Carey
No sociologist 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. — Max Weber
Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns. — Michelle Alexander
Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. — George H. Mead
If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons. — Pierre Bourdieu
The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation. — Peter Ustinov
Short Sociological Quotes
- History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim. — Robert Anton Wilson
- Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it. — David Crystal
- Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide. — Jean Baudrillard
- Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society. — Albion Woodbury Small
- There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character. — Emile Durkheim
- Social media is less about technology and more about anthropology, sociology, and ethnography. — Brian Solis
- One can't love humanity. One can only love people. — Graham Greene
- Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain. — Emile Durkheim
- Social media is about sociology and psychology more then technology. — Brian Solis
- The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society. — Fulton J. Sheen
What Is Sociology Quotes
It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed. — Emile Durkheim
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable. — Graham Greene
Design, to me, is part psychology, part sociology, and part magic. A good decorator should know what's going on in someone's marriage and how their kids are doing in school. — Nate Berkus
All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen. — Zygmunt Bauman
I was a sociology major. And it had nothing to do necessarily with law, which is ultimately - I went to law school. But what I tried to do was choose something that I was passionate about or something that I cared about. — Michelle Obama
That's what hip-hop is: It's sociology and English put to a beat, you know. — Talib Kweli
This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history. — Kehinde Wiley
I was not a great student at the University of Chicago. I think that is - the record will bare me out. But I spent a lot of time reading history, sociology, psychology - reading everything except what I was supposed to read for class the next day. — Bernie Sanders
I make these little films. I'm just a working person. I just study people a little bit more. It's more sociological, and it's funny anyway - not that serious. It's not like false humility. I just take it for what it is. — Julie Delpy
The attempt to isolate economics from other disciplines-notably politics, history, philosophy, finance, constitutional theory and sociology-has fatally disabled its power to explain what is happening in the world. — Will Hutton
Social Science Quotes
Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval. — Naval Ravikant
At different times I taught humanities, social sciences and pre-vocational education. — Estelle Morris, Baroness Morris of Yardley
At different times I taught humanities, social sciences and pre-vocational education. — Estelle Morris
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway
I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information. — Irvine Welsh
The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't. — Ernest Rutherford
In any profession, 90% of people are clueless but work by situational imitation, narrow mimicry and semi-conscious role-playing. Except social science and journalism where it is 99% and 100%, respectively. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The opposite of education is not ignorance; it is education in social science. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution ... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry. — Harold Wilson
We want to ensure a multilateral development of society, the thriving of all sides of social life, economy, science and culture, the improvement of management, the moulding of the new man and the promotion of socialist ethics and equity. — Nicolae Ceausescu
Social Theory Quotes
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. — John Rawls
For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.' — Emma Watson
My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws. — Ida Tarbell
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all. — Alexis de Tocqueville
According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy. — Mikhail Gorbachev
As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism. — Rose Wilder Lane
Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them — Bruno Latour
Internationalism is a social and political theory, a certain concept of how human society ought to be organized, and in particular a concept of how the nations ought to organize their mutual relations. — Christian Lous Lange
Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism. — Vladimir Lenin
In social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy results from diverse sources of information conveyed vicariously and through social evaluation, as well as through direct experience — Albert Bandura
People Writing About Sociological
More Sociological Quotes
According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process – moving from “traditional” to “modern” society – but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them. — Stephen Kotkin
Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other. — David Riesman
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department. — Thomas Sowell
The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism. — David Talbot
Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables. — Anatol Rapoport
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology. — W. H. Auden
War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies. — Ernest Becker
History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick — Edward Hallett Carr
Art should never be sociological; it has got to be timeless. It's got to be your vision and how you can represent the world you see. — Vivienne Westwood
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong. — Karl Popper
Colleges don't teach economics properly. Unfortunately we learn little from the experience of the past. An economist must know, besides his subject, ethics, logic, philosophy, the humanities and sociology, in fact everything that is part of how we live and react to one another. — Bernard Baruch
The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture — Peter L. Berger
There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale. — Ralph Ellison
Some psychological and sociological conditioning occurs in every man's life and this affects the decisions he makes. But we must resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning. — Francis Schaeffer
Sociology should... be thought of as a science of action-of the ultimate common value element in its relations to the other elements of action. — Talcott Parsons
Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. — James Hillman
If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working. — Frank Zappa
The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic. — Leslie Fiedler
I had a certain kind of disassociation from the other kids because I had more interest in sociology, ideas and trying to communicate those ideas to the kids around me. — Andy Biersack
I think that the fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in "hard" science, could become a dogma, can be explained only on sociological grounds. — Ludwig von Bertalanffy
The sociological evidence of the contagion of happiness and sadness suggests something quite remarkable: of all your relationships, of all the people capable of making you happiest or irritating you the most, those who have the greatest effect on your mood and even your state of health are those closest to hand. — Lynne McTaggart
That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent. — George Stigler
My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry. — Vilfredo Pareto
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable. — Nadine Gordimer
If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there." — Tom DeMarco
I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it. — Andre Dubus
We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry. — Denise Scott Brown
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of sociological quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about sociological to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of sociological quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
Embed HTML Link
Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage