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Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.

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
Gives
Stamps
Involved
Explained
Personal
Temperament
Special
Phenomenon
Causes
Suicide
Stamp
Social
Victim
Expresses
Cannot
General
Consequently
Giving
Conditions
Suicidal

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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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Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.
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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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I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.
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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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Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
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To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
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When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
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Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
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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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It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.
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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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The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.
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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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From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations reality is therefore abandoned.
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Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.
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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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Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
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The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
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