"The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor — a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term : the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions."

“Personal identity, like social identity, divides up the individual's world of others for him. The division is first between the knowing and the unknowing. The knowing are those who have a personal identification of the individual; they need only see him or hear his name to bring this information into play. The unknowing are those for whom the individual constitutes an utter stranger, someone of whom they have begun no personal biography.”

“I mean this report to serve as a sort of handbook detailing one sociological perspective from which social life can be studied, especially the kind of social life that is organised within the physical confines of a building or plant. A set of features will be described which together form a framework that can be applied to any concrete social establishment, be it domestic, industrial, or commercial.”

“Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.”

“When an individual appears before others, he wittingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part. When an event occurs which is expressively incompatible with this fostered impression, significant consequences are simultaneously felt in three levels of social reality, each of which involves a different point of reference and a different order of fact.”

“In this essay I want to review some work on stigma, especially some popular work, to see what it can yield for sociology. An exercise will be undertaken in marking off the material on stigma from neighbouring facts, in showing how this material can be economically described within a single conceptual scheme, and in clarifying the relation of stigma to the subject matter of deviance. This task will allow me to formulate and use a special set of concepts, those that bear on 'social information', the information the individual directly conveys about himself.”

“Often, when two teams enter social interaction, we can identify one as having the lower general prestige and the other team the higher. Ordinarily, when we think of realigning actions in such cases, we think of efforts on the part of the lower team to alter the basis of interaction in a direction more favourable to them or to decrease the social distance and formality between themselves and the higher team. Interestingly enough, there are occasions when it serves the wider goals of the higher team to lower barriers and admit the lower team to greater intimacy and equality with it.”