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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.

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
Merely
Attributed
Subjects
Autonomy
Especially
Distinguished
Single
Relative
Environment
Immediately
Others
Contact
Persons
Relation
Person
Subject

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When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.
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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 mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.
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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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There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life for this the individual is incompetent.
Emile Durkheim
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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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When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
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Melancholy suicide. - This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract.
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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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Irrespective of any external, regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
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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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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.
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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.
Emile Durkheim