Social Science Quotes

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Married women are far more depressed than married men -- in unhappy marriages, three times more; and -- interestingly -- in happy marriages, five times more. In truth, it is men who are thriving in marriage, now as always, and who show symptoms of psychological and physical distress outside it. Not only their emotional well-being but their very lives, some studies say, depend on being married!”
― Dalma Heyn

“A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold”
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

“A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life”
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

“There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who have never risked an exploration of the unknown, who have never attempted the kind of creativity of which men and women are potentially capable.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“To me it was plain silly. It is so obvious that life works in terms of species rather than individuals. The individual just has to be born, to develop to the point at which it can procreate, and then to fall away into death to make way for its successors, and humans are no exception whatever they may fancy.”
― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

“[F]or a social theorist ignorance is more excusable than vagueness. Other investigators can easily show I am wrong if I am sufficiently precise. They will have much more difficulty showing by investigation what, precisely, I mean if I am vague. I hope not to be forced to weasel out with 'But I didn’t really mean that.' Social theorists should prefer to be wrong rather than misunderstood. Being misunderstood shows sloppy theoretical work.”
― Arthur Stinchcombe

“Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband and wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species? As ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? ...a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species?”
― Christopher Ryan

“Any individual exhibiting a personal instability comparable to the economic and social instability of capitalism would long ago have been required to seek professional help and to make basic changes.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“The system is a contradiction: the very logic imposed on the capitalist enterprise undermines the overall success of the capitalist. For Marxists, no law, rule, regulation, or behavior pattern provides an escape from this contradiction; none ever has.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“Underlying or overall social mobility rates are much lower than those typically estimated by sociologists or economists. The intergenerational correlation in all societies for which we construct surname estimates - medieval England, modern England, the United States, India, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Chile, and even egalitarian Sweden - is between 0.7 and 0.9, much higher than conventionally estimated. Social status is inherited as strongly as any biological trait, such as height.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“Western democracies have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed”
― F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

“Reports in earlier working papers that the true persistence rate of social status is on the order of 0.75, even in the United States and Sweden, were greeted by many commentators with dismay. And indeed, even with the earlier reports of persistence rates of 0.5, many people already regarded U.S. society as mired in unfairness.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“The proposition that elites and underclasses are not created by religion, culture, or race is supported by evidence from the United States on current elite and underclass populations. A quick confirmation of this proposition can be obtained by looking at surnames identified with particular ethnic or national groups and counting the numbers of registered physicians per thousand of each surname type in 2000. We can divide this number by the average number of physicians registered per person in the United States in 2000. For the population as a whole, this number will be one.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“Interestingly, with respect to social mobility rates, the twenty-seven adult great-great grandchildren of Charles Darwin, born on average nearly 150 years after Darwin, are still a surprisingly distinguished cohort. Eleven are notable enough to have Wikipedia pages, or the like, such as Times obituaries, devoted to them. They include six university professors, four authors, a painter, three medical doctors, a well-known conservationist, and a film director.”
― Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility

“These enactments of state and class power, moreover, through their imbrication of public and private security, engendered a particular politics of social and spatial exclusion.”
― Kristin V. Monroe, The Insecure City: Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut

“With the arrival of AI, you have the option to free up a lot of cognitive load. Do not see this as a threat; see this as an opportunity to double down on the talents you were born with, and develop them further.”
― Jacob Eliza, The No-Brainers: Your Panic-Free Guide to AI and the Modern Good Life

“Power through paranoia - politics 101.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Humanitarian Dictator

“Logic, Science, Social Science, Spirituality, and History are contexts of philosophy that measure and reflect its depth and breadth of vision; they represent its essence and nature.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“We actually get quite a lot from casual social interactions. Even when phones are at their most useful--such as when we're bored to death in the waiting room--there might be other things we're missing out on. - Kostadin Kushlev, social psychologist at Georgetown University”
― Donna B McKinney, How Do Smartphones Affect Social Interaction?

“A moment’s reflection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilization. As we saw in earlier chapters, tracing the place of women in societies without writing often means using clues left, quite literally, in the fabric of material culture, such as painted ceramics that mimic both textile designs and female bodies in their forms and elaborate decorative structures. To take just two examples, it’s hard to believe that the kind of complex mathematical knowledge displayed in early Mesopotamian cuneiform documents or in the layout of Peru’s Chavín temples sprang fully formed from the mind of a male scribe or sculptor, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in earlier times through concrete practices such as the solid geometry and applied calculus of weaving or beadwork. What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.”
― David Graeber, David Wengrow

“La società è un intruso nella vita di ogni individuo.”
― Paolo Stauder, Come si diventa normali

“Anthropology is sometimes described as the art of 'making the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar'. It has also been described as 'the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities'.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology?

“The truth is not only do appearances never reveal what lies beneath them of their own accord, but also, generally speaking, they never just reveal; they also conceal. No thing, no side of a thing shows itself except by actively hiding the others. They expose and they also protect from exposure and as far as what lies beneath is concerned, this protection may even be their most important function. This is true for living things, whose surface hides and protects the inner organs that are their source of life.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“While the culture of manager and therapist does not speak in the language of traditional moralities, it nonetheless proffers a normative order of life, with character ideals, images of the good life, and methods of attaining it. Yet it is an understanding of life generally hostile to older ideas of moral order. Its center is the autonomous individual, presumed able to choose the roles he wil play and the commitments he will make, not on the basis of higher truths but according to the criterion of life-effectiveness as the individual judges it.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

“...it is one of the striking things about social life that nothing ever comes off exactly as intended. Things always turn out a little bit differently. We hardly ever produce in social life precisely the effect that we wish to produce, and we usually get things that we do not want into the bargain. Of course, we act with certain aims in mind; but apart from the question of these aims (which we may or may not really achieve) there are always certain unwanted consequences of our actions; and usually these unwanted consequences cannot be eliminated … We wish to foresee not only the direct consequences but also these unwanted indirect consequences. Why should we wish to foresee them? Either because of our scientific curiosity, or because we want to be prepared for them; we may wish, if possible, to meet them and prevent them from becoming too important. (This means, again, action, and with it the creation of further unwanted consequences.)
I think that the people who approach the social sciences with a ready-made conspiracy theory thereby deny themselves the possibility of ever understanding what the task of the social sciences is, for they assume that we can explain practically everything in society by asking who wanted it, whereas the real task of the social sciences is to explain those things which nobody wants -- such as, for example, a war, or a depression.”
― Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge

“Acceptance is not agreement; it is acknowledgement.”
― Norman Arthur Taylor