Émile Durkheim

The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things.

A crime is a crime because we condemn it.

Man is a moral being only because he lives in society.

The individual, by himself, is not a moral being.

Society is not a mere sum of individuals; it is a system formed by their association, and represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics.

When the social organism is in a state of health, the division of labor produces solidarity.

Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part.

The more weakened the groups to which he belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.

Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

The sacred and the profane are two distinct classes of phenomena, two worlds separated by an abyss.

Collective representations are the result of an immense cooperation which has been extended not only in space but also in time.

The individual is dominated by a moral reality greater than himself: society.

The true function of education is to adapt the child to the social environment in which he is destined to live.

Education is the action exercised by the older generations upon those who are not yet ready for social life.

The more primitive a society, the more resemblance there is between the individuals who compose it.

Mechanical solidarity is solidarity by resemblance.

Organic solidarity is solidarity by differentiation.

Anomie is a state of normlessness.

The normal type of a social phenomenon is the average type.

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.