Emile Durkheim

When a society is deeply divided, it tends to commit suicide collectively.

The greater the number of individuals who are isolated, the greater the number of suicides.

Society is not a mere sum of individuals, but the system formed by their association has its own reality.

A crime is a crime because it is punished; it is not punished because it is a crime.

The individual is not born, but becomes, a member of society.

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 all those who adhere to them.

The collective conscience is the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society.

Social facts are ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion by reason of which they control him.

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

The abnormal is not necessarily the pathological.

The true function of religion is not to make us think, but to make us act.

Moral rules are not arbitrary decrees, but conditions of social life.

The more primitive a society, the more sacred are its collective representations.

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

The ultimate source of all values is society itself.

The division of labor is not merely an economic phenomenon, but a moral one.

Individual consciousness is only a part of the collective consciousness.

Suicide is not a private act, but a social phenomenon.

The sacred is that which is set apart and forbidden.

The family is the elementary form of society.