Peter L. Berger

Society provides us with an identity, a location in the world, a name, a history, a future. We are, in a very profound sense, products of society.

The first wisdom of sociology is this: things are not what they seem.

Man is a being who externalizes himself in activity, and who apprehends himself as externalized in the products of his activity.

Reality is socially constructed.

To be human is to be situated in a world that is meaningful.

Religion is the establishment, through human activity, of an all-embracing sacred order, that is, of a sacred cosmos that will be capable of maintaining itself in the face of the chaos of experience.

Modernity is characterized by a pervasive sense of homelessness, a loss of belonging, a feeling of being adrift in a world without fixed points of reference.

Pluralism is the coexistence of different worldviews, values, and lifestyles within the same society.

Humor is a way of stepping outside the taken-for-granted reality and seeing it in a new light.

The sociologist is someone who is intensely, endlessly, shamelessly interested in the doings of men.

Every human society is an enterprise of world-building.

Secularization is not the disappearance of religion, but its transformation.

The individual is not simply a passive recipient of social forces, but an active participant in the construction of reality.

Ideology is a system of ideas that legitimates a particular social order.

The sociologist's task is to understand the world as it is, not as it ought to be.

Freedom is the awareness of necessity.

The problem of meaning is the central problem of human existence.

To live is to live in a world of meanings.

The modern world is characterized by a crisis of legitimation.

The sociologist must be a marginal man, standing both inside and outside society.