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Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

Emile Durkheim

Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Finding Lose Moral People
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Assign Capacity Feeling Human Nature Ourselves Variable
To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Definition Goal Happiness Pursue State
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Death Escape Grace Hallucination Imagination Kill Mystery Obedience Patient Suicide
When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Force Law Necessary
A monomaniac is a sick person whose mentality is perfectly healthy in all respects but one; he has a single flaw, clearly localized. At times, for example, he has an unreasonable and absurd desire to drink or steal or use abusive language; but all his other acts and all his other thoughts are strictly correct.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Absurd Drink Health Himself Language Perfection Person Sick Thinking Time
At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Logic Relation Religion
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Cling Group Life Live Man Object Social Society Solidarity Vanish
Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Cloth Creation Ourselves Reach Sadness World
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Break Character Continue Fear Separate
The term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result
EMILE DURKHEIM

Death Known Negative Positive Production Result Suicide Victim
There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Character History Name Sociology Worth
It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Comfortable Greatness Harsh Time
The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Basic Fact Rule Social
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.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Act Change Define Different End Identity Nature Similar System
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Comparison Man Obligation Religion

Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

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Socialism is not a science, a sociology in miniature: it is a cry of pain.

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