Sociology

🇩🇪Karl Marx

Philosophy

Materialism

1867–1894

"I have just noticed in the 2nd edition of The Times that the Prussian Second Chamber has finally done something worthwhile. We shall soon have revolution."

🇫🇷Michel Foucault

Literature

atheism

1926–1984

"Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems."

🇩🇪Jürgen Habermas

Philosophy

Pragmatism

1929–2026

"The speaker must choose a comprehensible [verständlich] expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another."

Max Weber

Science

1836–1897

"Politics means a strong slow drilling of hard boards, with passion and judgment at the same time."

🇫🇷Jean Baudrillard

Philosophy

Post-structuralism

1929–2007

"There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea."

Erich Fromm

Psychology

Frankfurt School

1900–1980

"To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime."

"As a suggested working definition, we may define power as control or influence over the actions of others to promote one's goals without their consent, against their "will," or without their knowledge or understanding."

🇺🇸James Samuel Coleman

Literature

1926–1995

"Industrial society has made of high school a social system of adolescents...set apart, in an institution of their own."

Ernest Gellner

Philosophy

critical rationalism

1925–1995

"Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society."

🇸🇪Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden

Politics

b. 1946

"For me it is important to live in harmony with developments in Sweden and all over the changing world around us that we are actually part of."

"Powerfully positioned middlemen extract value by interrupting or distorting information."

🇺🇸Ida B. Wells

Education

1862–1931

"The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right."

Ibn Khaldun

Economics

1332–1406

"All the sciences came to exist in Arabic. The systematic works on them were written in Arabic writing."

"“We were not going to understand gender inequality or unless we understood the interpersonal processes that mediated and enacted institutional structures and larger patterns of inequality."

"Religion as a whole is but a form of loyalty to the interests of English property."

🇺🇸Erving Goffman

Psychology

1922–1982

"The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented."

🇺🇸Frances Perkins

Politics

1880–1965

"From this day forward, I will be a Doer of the Word and not as Hearer only, whenever and wherever I see the need."

🇺🇸W. Richard Scott

Science

b. 1932

"Contingency theory is guided by the general orienting hypothesis that organizations whose internal features best match the demands of their environments will achieve the best adaptation."

🇮🇳Deendayal Upadhyaya

Politics

Humanism

1916–1968

"Politics is ultimately subservient to the interests of the nation. If we give up all thoughts of a nation’s basic identity, history, culture and traditions, of what use is that politics ?"

🇦🇺Randa Abdel-Fattah

Literature

b. 1979

"Distance in time has made my voice less contrived and subjective. I don’t feel I’m writing some kind of diary . I am far more conscious of my voice and more disciplined in separating myself from my characters…"

🇺🇸C. Wright Mills

Politics

1916–1962

"When ever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected."

🇺🇸Howard S. Becker

Literature

1928–2023

"Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal."

"To know thyself is the ultimate form of aggression."

"The overriding crucial implication of the structural adjustment policies was that the villagers would have to fend for themselves in all conceivable respects."

🇸🇪Gunnar Myrdal

Economics

1898–1987

"Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society."

🇩🇪Niklas Luhmann

Philosophy

1927–1998

"Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature."

🇩🇪Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Economics

Austrian school

b. 1949

"Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else."

"“No material culture is found to move from west to east across the Indus”."

🇭🇺Karl Polanyi

Economics

1886–1964

"The economic system is, in effect, a mere function of social organization."

Adam Ferguson

Literature

Scottish Enlightenment

1723–1816

"Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarrelled, in troops and companies."