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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.

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
Idea
Given
Soul
Ideas
Essential
Essentials
Birth
Society
Religion

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Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.
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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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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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When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.
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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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We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
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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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Social life comes from a double source, the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour.
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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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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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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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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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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 cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one's inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.
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While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.
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The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings.
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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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To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
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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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The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.
Emile Durkheim