Browse Quotes

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

The great test of the morality of any political institution is the effect it has on the character of the people.

Liquid modernity is the condition of constant change, where nothing is solid and everything is in flux.

Power, in the network society, is not located in institutions, organizations, or even in symbolic repertoires. It is diffused in the networks.

A sociology for women would be a sociology that would make it possible for women to understand the world and to act in it.

Black feminist thought consists of ideas produced by Black women intellectuals and activists about a standpoint of and for Black women.

Trust is not the absence of risk, but the ability to cope with it.

The most absolute of all powers is that which does not need to say anything.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify.

The more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.

The structure of the social system is defined by the patterned expectations of behavior which are institutionalized in the roles of its members.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

Money is the purest reification of means, the most absolute instrument.

The dead govern the living.

The state is not a neutral arbiter but an arena of conflict.

Democracy is not a rational consensus, but a hegemonic articulation of different demands.

Gender is not always-already an identity; it is a doing, a performance, a construction.

The entitlement theory of justice in holdings is historical; whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about.

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.