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Each new generation is reared by its predecessor the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.

Emile Durkheim

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Emile Durkheim
Age: 59 †
Born: 1858
Born: January 1
Died: 1917
Died: January 1
Anthropologist
Historian Of Religion
Philosopher
Professor
Sociologist
Troyes
Aube France
Emile Durkheim
Order
Successors
Must
Predecessors
Improve
Latter
Generation
Predecessor
Therefore
Reared
Generations
Successor
Movement
Circular

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Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.
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Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
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There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
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Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
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An act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.
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Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to.
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A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.
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One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.
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A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
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Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
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The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.
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If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
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Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
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There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.
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At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
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It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
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Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
Emile Durkheim
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Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.
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By definition, sacred beings are separated beings. That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane beings.
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The Christian conceives of his abode on Earth in no more delightful colors than the Jainist sectarian. He sees in it only a time of sad trial he also thinks that his true country is not of this world.
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