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

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

“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

“Leadership has never been an exact science. But it has always found itself particularly challenged when tasked with elevating one segment of a society onto a level more politically, socially, and economically equitable with another.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“[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

“He saw himself as a hated prier into the homes of strangers, a kind of intellectual charlatan rationalizing his own prurience into scientific curiosity; someone at once lower and more pretentious than a professional social worker.”
― Harry Sylvester, Dayspring

“Greed is not the cause of capitalists' behavior; it is a quality they acquire in accommodating to and internalizing the requirements of competitive survival within the capitalist system.”
― 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

“Either we integrate, or we disintegrate.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“Vandalism Ain't Activism (The Sonnet)

Systemic change is a slow and tedious process,
It doesn't happen overnight by vandalizing society.
If vandalism and activism were one and the same,
Our jungly ancestors would've been the ideal humanity.
Change habits, change yourself, submit to no primitivity,
The change that you dream of, be the epitome of that change.
Obstructing traffic and refusing to let an ambulance pass,
You're not fighting any crisis, but being a crisis yourself.
Go fly a kite, it is good for the mind as well as body,
Get lessons on common sense before appointing yourself king.
The line between activism and terrorism is so thin that,
Often many go astray without having the slightest inkling.
I repeat, systemic change is a slow and tedious process.
The more you rush with recklessness, the more you digress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Vandalism ain't activism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Systemic change is a slow and tedious process,
It doesn't happen overnight by vandalizing society.
If vandalism and activism were one and the same,
Our jungly ancestors would've been the ideal humanity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“There is no such thing as pop culture, you can either have populism or culture.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Contrary to popular belief, politics is not the problem, the real bane of a democratic society is partisanism. Because politics involves interest of the people, whereas partisanism involves interest of the politicians.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“Democracy, civilization, society, all shall come, when we're aware of the duties of designation human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence

“The likelihood of a war occurring is foreseeable, to some extent, as a qualitative rough prediction. However, the course of a war, once started, is usually somewhat unpredictable. This is because most wars are the result of miscalculation by one or more of the contending parties.”
― Eric Engle, Cold War II? China, America, Global Strategy, and the New Cold War

“Neoliberalism has, to a great extent, succeeded in replacing in-depth, critical, and independent social science with research funded by corporations to serve corporate interests. We are seeing a sharp decline of independent writers and researchers and a sharp rise of UX (user experience) jobs that are often narrow in scope, and solely focused on understanding users not to create a more informed and critical society, but simply to increase numbers, get users to consume more, and to increase profits for the few at the top.”
― Louis Yako

“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

“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

“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

“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