Peter Berger Sociologist Quotes

#1. Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#2. Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#3. The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#4. In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#5. He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#6. If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#7. Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#8. On the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism. On the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal. In other words, man's experience of himself always hovers in a balance between being and having a body, a balance that must be redressed again and again. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#9. Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#10. If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#11. But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#12. An economy oriented toward production for market exchange provides the optimal conditions for long-lasting and ever-expanding productive capacity based on modern technology. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#13. In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#14. We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#15. It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#16. As Peter Berger has noted, the strategy of apologizing for Christian faith by trying to demonstrate its social utility is always eventually self-liquidating. Sooner of later people realize that a great many of the supposedly practical and secular benefits of the Christian religion can be had more easily without religion ... The logic of practical atheism may well be more deeply ingrained in the evangelical tradition than conservatives perhaps have realized. #Quote by Craig M. Gay

#17. I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#18. In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#19. In all its manifestations, religion constitutes an immense projection of human meanings into the empty vastness of the universe-a projection, to be sure, which comes back as an alien reality to haunt its producers.' - p.100, 'The Sacred Canopy #Quote by Peter Berger

#20. The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#21. ...his consuming interest remains in the world of men, their institutions, their history, their passions. And because he is interested in men, nothing that men do can be altogether tedious...He will naturally be interested in the events that engage men's ultimate beliefs, their moments of tragedy and grandeur and ecstasy. But he will also be fascinated by the commonplace, the everyday. He will know reverence, but this reverence will not prevent him from wanting to see and to understand. He may sometimes feel revulsion or contempt , but this will also not deter him from wanting to have his questions answered. ...in his quest for understanding, moves through the world of men without respect for the usual lines of demarcation. Nobility ad degradation, power and obscurity, intelligence and folly -- these are equally interesting to him, however unequal they may be in his personal values or tastes. This his questions may lead him to all possible levels of society, the best and least known places, the most respected and the most despised. ...he will find himself in all these places because his own questions have so taken possession of him that he has little choice but to seek for answers. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#22. Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#23. In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#24. East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#25. Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#26. There are times in history when the dark drums of God can barely be heard amid the noises of this world. Then it is only in moments of silence, which are rare and brief, that their beat can be faintly discerned. There are other times. These are the times when God is heard in rolling thunder, when the earth trembles and the treetops bend under the force of [God's] voice. It is not given to men [and women] to make God speak. It is only given to them to live and to think in such a way that, if God's thunder should come, they will not have stopped their ears. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#27. I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#28. F. A. Hayek is probably the most prominent advocate of capitalism in the present period. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#29. If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#30. He who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter
until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#31. Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution.21 What must be stressed is the reciprocity of institutional typifications and the typicality of not only the actions but also the actors in institutions. The typifications of habitualized actions that constitute institutions are always shared ones. They are available to all the members of the particular social group in question, and the institution itself typifies individual actors as well as individual actions. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#32. Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful. #Quote by Peter L. Berger

#33. We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom. And in this same act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline #Quote by Peter Berger

#34. we don't develop along these lines, we will have poor differentiation and a very fragile sense of self. We will feel overly anxious about being loved #Quote by Allen Berger

#35. So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.
This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand. #Quote by Peter Watts

#36. We tend to think that people are more to blame for their acts than for their omissions. #Quote by Peter Singer

#37. Focus on opportunities, not problems. #Quote by Peter Drucker