The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.
The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.
He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.
Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.
In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness.
Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.
In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.
Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.
Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.
An economy oriented toward production for market exchange provides the optimal conditions for long-lasting and ever-expanding productive capacity based on modern technology.
Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there’s no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance.
If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.
Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic.