#sociology-quotes

[thepersonalwords]

Teach your little ones about the rules of decent behaviour. When they grow up, it will be too late to learn.

Eraldo Banovac

[quotelr]

Acquiring knowledge through the centuries has influenced human society more than all other factors.

Eraldo Banovac

[sivavakkiyar]

Herzog was real for this

[dakota-zen]

[st-just]

A great question to get at this is: Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail? If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time.  The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.  The final form of Descartes’ published synthesis was self-censorship—self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power.

-Ada Palmer, Tools for Thinking About Censorship

[eelhound]

"Scandinavian countries maintain what sociologists call 'low power distance' cultures, where extreme wealth disparities and conspicuous consumption are regarded with suspicion rather than admiration. Status anxiety still exists, but the structural features of the economy take the edge off, making it easier for other prosocial values to emerge. It becomes possible to locate the value of solidarity over competition, social cohesion over social rank, efficiency over theatrical displays of work commitment, and leisure over performance.

By contrast, the United States has a culture of competitive individualism fostered by our winner-take-all economic system. Here, things that might otherwise be considered entitlements are almost always commodities instead. Every element of a decent life, from health care to shelter to education, is sold on the private market. The richer the person, the higher the bid, the better the living. Relaxation is a failure to grow wealth, which is in turn a failure to live well. It’s a remarkable perversion: capitalism has actually weaponized the concept of 'the good life' against the notion of doing what we want with our time.

When essential components of a dignified life are collectively guaranteed rather than individually bought and sold, 'the good life' ceases to be a function of wealth or a reward contingent upon endless work. Instead, it becomes a baseline expectation rooted in human dignity and social citizenship.

The Scandinavian countries got this way through sustained class struggle. Workers’ movements wrested control of productivity gains from capital, refusing to accept that increased efficiency should only benefit shareholders and executives. Ending unnecessary toil requires expanding economic democracy, not just relying on market rationality."

- Meagan Day, from "We Shouldn’t Have to Work This Hard." Jacobin, 23 March 2025.

[noosphe-re]

Today's society is no longer Foucault's disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer "obedience-subjects" but "achievement-subjects." They are entrepreneurs of themselves. The walls of disciplinary institutions, which separate the normal from the abnormal, have come to seem archaic. Foucault's analysis of power cannot account for the psychic and topological changes that occurred as disciplinary society transformed into achievement society. Nor does the commonly employed concept of "control society" do justice to this change. It still contains too much negativity.

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

[she-is-ovarit]

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

- Desmond Tutu

[theoptia]

Ed Simon, from Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain

Text ID: The numinous realm, the astral plane, the transcendent dimension—the sacred—is a terrifying kingdom,

[astrosouldivinity]

“𝐀 𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠.” -𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐦 𝐗

We are stepping into a new world. One where community and connection will be more essential than ever. It's time to set aside our differences and unite for our collective survival. Do not be afraid; the current state of America should not discourage you. This is a transformative period, an evolution of our true selves. While humanity is growing, and societal structures may be crumbling, we must get ready for this emergence of a new way of life. 🙏🏿

The Age of Aquarius embraces you. Are you ready for change?

-Kiki ♡

𝙿𝚕𝚞𝚝𝚘 𝚒𝚗 𝙰𝚚𝚞𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚞𝚜

𝙲𝚊𝚙𝚒𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚖 𝙿𝚝. 1

𝙲𝚊𝚙𝚒𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚖 𝙿𝚝. 2

©𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍𝚒𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚝𝚢 𝙰𝚕𝚕 𝚁𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝𝚜 𝚁𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚎𝚍.

[wavecorewave]

Most people today believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms. American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones. They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.

From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow

[thepersonalwords]

Tell us which ideas you promote and we will know which type of person you are.

Eraldo Banovac

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

dannies are like “yeah i know i have the worst taste. don’t worry i know i’m garbage. also sorry for having a lesbian crush on dan howell idk how to explain it he’s just my wife sometimes. also i hate him but it’s only ok for me to hate him btw. i’m very ashamed but sadly i was just born this way and lady gaga told me to love myself the way i was born but i make it pretty fucking hard to do that. dan is an annoying dumb whiny bitch and he’s everything to me. phil is a god and deserves to be worshipped as such i just belong in the trash bin with dan. it’s where i was born it’s where i grew up and its where i will die. its who i am inside and out to my core. i cannot tell you what this man means to me. he’s so stupid and he owns my heart. every time he talks i scream SHUT UP at my phone and here’s his handwriting tattooed on my arm. love is love okay and god has cursed me to love a cringefail whore that’s just the way it is. yeah ‘embrace the void and have the courage to exist’ was my senior quote so what. what about it. let me have inferior taste. yknow what why are you interrogating me” and honestly we’re so real for that

[weil-weil-lautre]

The moment a thing is named, the moment representation and concepts take hold of it, is the moment when it begins to lose its energy--with the risk that it will become a truth or impose itself as ideology. It is when a thing is beginning to disappear that the concept appears.

Jean Baudrillard, "Why Is there Nothing Rather than Something?" (2007)

[dakota-zen]

[st-just]

A central misconception regarding American education is that we are a uniquely terrible nation when it comes to schooling. This assumption is not defensible. It’s certainly true that our performance does not look good relative to expenditures, but then school funding is not consistently or simplistically associated with student performance. Overall, I think the evidence is strong that the United States has mediocre mean academic outcomes and that this disappointing average performance is the product of a relatively small number of schools in economically-challenged parts of the country that perform truly terribly. Our median student does alright, not great but alright, but our worst-performing students struggle dramatically compared to the rest of the developed world. Meanwhile, the top-performing American public school students are competitive with those from anywhere; I would put our top 1% or 3% or 5% of students up against those from any country. In events like the International Chemistry Olympiad and the International Mathematics Olympiad, for example, American students have excelled for decades. American high school students go on to flourish in the most elite universities in the world. Our problem isn’t at the top. The story of American education is not of generically bad or even mediocre results but of extreme inequality. Which is the general American story.

-Freddie deBoer