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.

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.

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.

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...

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 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...

The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the...

Tribal people get more out of life.

We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the...

The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived...

In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the...

And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.