Eighteenth-century matrons would have never have dreamed of appointing a redhaired wet nurse for their precious offspring - redheads passed on their horrible characters through their milk.

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

Fascism is a religious concept.

We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.

A 'good' family, it seems, is one that used to be better.

When you strip hope from people, it leaves a void, and that void needs to be filled. And very likely, that void is going to be filled by an ideology... Hope and faith are so connected. Now, when...

Upper classes are a nation's past the middle - class is its future.

Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.

Today while the titular head of the family may still be the father everyone knows that he is little more than chairman at most of the entertainment committee.

Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration...

How old did someone have to be before they could be put to use to make tea?

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

At its most basic, the allure of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, liberal or conservative, is that it provides an appealing order to things that are actually disorderly.

The point of an organic family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves. They may accept the services that...

- If a woman wears a short skirt in the company of a man it means "I want to fuck", if she talks with a man when she wears a short skirt it means "I want to fuck just you". - And if I have no clothes...

What makes a human being want to kill another who has done him no personal harm? Patriotism.

The secret of modernity is hidden in its capacity to recruit people from any background and any confession to participate in the greatest of military campaigns, the campaign for the progressive relief...

Sociologists have a theory of the looking - glass self. You become what the most important person in your life {wife, father, boss, etc.} thinks you are. How would my life change if I truly believed...

The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

Nation-states resemble war; city-states resemble commerce; families resemble stability; and individuals resemble entertainment

You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.

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

The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the...

Impatience is a twentieth-century virtue. At twenty, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed, they realised they would not...

Bantu Philosophy: People cling to life and are not yet at the stage where they will fight for the quality of that life. They feel as long as they are surviving, that is enough.

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck's policy of force and war, had traded for material...

Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.

This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the...

Edward Tylor, a distinguished nineteenth-century cultural anthropologist. For him, culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities...