Sociologist Quotes

“Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.”

“One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.”

“But the more these conscious illusions of the ruling class are shown to be false and the less they satisfy common sense, the more dogmatically they are asserted and the more deceitful, moralizing and spiritual becomes the language of established society.”

“We should not say that one man's hour is worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time's carcass.”

“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”

“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”

“Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value.”

“It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.”

“When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.”

“The method of production of the material things of life generally determines the social, political and spiritual currents of life.”

“Junk food, empty calories and carbs are the Big Data of the masses”

“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole”

“Capitalist agricultural production prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer.”

“Philosophy studies the world, but the point is to change it.”

“When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.”

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it”

“The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.”

“Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded.”

“If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.”

“Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.”

“The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.”

“Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.”

“The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.”

“In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.”

“All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”