The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.

You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest

Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.

Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

For one to be free there must be at least two.

You are a stranger, I am a stranger, we all remain strangers, and nevertheless we can like or even love each other.

The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.

We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

The value of other people is that they have something unique to offer.

Isn’t it tragic that sometimes it takes grief to understand what we have held so dear?

Without challenge we become too comfortable with life.

Juvenile appraisals of other juveniles make up in clarity what they lack in charity.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

You have a real asset-price bubble in places like parts of California and the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

To be black and beautiful means nothing in this world unless we are black and powerful.

I do not believe it is right to identify Islam with violence. This is not right or true.

Ruby Stevens was determined, ambitious and tough. She had to fend for herself in so many ways as a child and always felt apart, on her own.

I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed.