Howard S. Becker

All social groups make rules and attempt, at some times and under some circumstances, to enforce them. Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as 'right' and forbidding others as 'wrong'.

Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender'. The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.

The problem of explanation is to account for the fact that a person has, over time, engaged in a particular pattern of deviant behavior.

The most important consequence of being labeled deviant is a drastic change in the individual's public identity.

One of the most crucial steps in the process of becoming a marijuana user is learning to enjoy the effects of the drug.

The conventional view of the deviant is that he is a person who has broken a rule, and that the rule is a good one, or at least a necessary one.

The sociologist, in his effort to be objective, must not allow his own moral preferences to influence his analysis of the social world.

We cannot assume that the categories of common sense are adequate for scientific analysis.

The study of deviance is the study of people who have been labeled as deviant.

The deviant is not a special kind of person, but a person who has been successfully labeled as deviant.

The most important thing about social problems is that they are not 'out there' in the world, but are constructed by people.

The sociologist's job is to understand how people define their situations, not to define them for them.

The world is full of people who are doing things that other people don't like.

The problem of deviance is not how to get people to conform, but how to understand why they don't.

The study of social life is the study of how people make sense of their world.

Good research is not about finding answers, but about asking better questions.

The best way to understand a social phenomenon is to participate in it.

Sociology is the study of how people do things together.

Art is what people call art.

The art world is a network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the works of art which that world characteristically produces.