2005, p. 808)

Stumbled upon this sentence in this article in Sociology and ended up writing a whole PhD around it.

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959, pp. 10–11)

This short quote ignited my sociological imagination, empowering me to enact agency via technologies of the self, to curate by body, mind and life. Prior to reading Foucault, I like so many, internalised experiences of discrimination and abuse, as an inevitable personal trouble.

This sentence for me sums up the ethical and political responses we might take as sociologists, as we engage with the world around us, with sociological theory and with our students.

but the state of mind of the observer as well.

Willard Waller, Social Problems and the Mores, American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Dec., 1936), pp. 922-933.

The foundation of the sociology of social problems - and much else besides. All social problems are problems in the eyes of someone who is defining them - and we must give that person and their perspective the same critical attention as those who are being defined, even if we sociologists are the people doing the defining or we happen to agree with the definition. Reflexivity 1930s style and so simply put.

George Sand

The Correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert - in the aftermath of the Paris Commune Massacre in 1871

Mills, C.W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

As an undergraduate in 2002, this sentence was the moment sociology clicked for me, becoming more than just theory. Now I am studying for a PhD in Sociology, investigating VCSE involvement in mental health research, and it still speaks to me. It legitimises lived experience without psychologising it, framing personal troubles as inseparable from structural conditions. It continues to shape how I think about mental health and inequality, and why individual stories need sociological explanation rather than individual blame.

Researcher Fatima FERHANE

This is a quotation from six hundred years ago and represents one of the earliest indications of thinking about the social through social constructionism.

By purpose moved, yet purposeless'

Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010 [Collected Works, vol. 10]), p. 62.

This little couplet, dating originally from 1939 (in German, of course), neatly encapsulates the central problem of understanding processes of social change, and bypasses all the rubbish about "agency and structure" that sociologists tend to bleat on about!

We need sociology because, as the market says, we can all participate, but we don't! Family is a place where we are equal; needless to say, deep down we all know it. The law says it is universal and equal protection of the law for everyone; our records and archives show how the law was biased and discriminatory. Sociology matters because a man and a woman are treated differently by the market, so does the age, caste, vocational skills, and bargaining power. Sociology helps you to "think" with footnotes.

Why it resonates:
This has stayed with me ever since I first heard it. I was an undergraduate student, unsure about the discipline and unsure about my place within it. Even in my final year, I often felt that our discussions produced no neat conclusions. Then this sentence arrived like an anchor. It taught me that sociology is not about quick resolutions; it is about learning how to think, how to pause before acting, and how to read the conditions that shape what appears universal.

Berger and Luckmann (1966). The Social Construction of Reality, p.211

This call to arms is both inspiration and a haunting wake-up call for sociology which in my view is continuously undermined by losing the wood for the trees in failing to deliver a coherent, integrated framework, scope and ontology (roughly equivalent to the physical sciences) that would underpin and ground the subject without losing its rich variety of perspectives.

A friend and colleague recently sent this to me, and it speaks volumes in the work I do: "If you educate a man, you educate an individual. But if you educate a woman, you educate a nation". This is widely attributed to Dr. James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927), a Ghanaian intellectual, educator, and Christian minister, highlighting the transformative impact of educating women on entire societies. 

May, V. (2011) ‘Self, Belonging and Social Change’, Sociology, 45(3), pp. 363–378. Page 373. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038511399624.

As the forever outsider, reading this sentence (and the paragraph it came from) during my master's was eye-opening, and made me feel hopeful.

This sentence has stayed with me because it reframed sociology as a way of knowing as well as an ethical practice. I often return to it when designing new research projects, especially in my commitment to participatory methods that try to give participants as much voice as possible. It has also shaped my interest in the everyday rather than the spectacular, and my focus on women’s lived experiences in areas that are often overlooked.

“The most fundamental and dangerous problem facing human societies is neither colonialism, nor exploitation, nor despotism; rather, it is estihmār (the systematic stupefaction of the masses) — yes, estihmār, estihmār, estihmār! Dr Mohamamd masud Noruzi-University of Liverpool

“The personal is political.”
— Carol Hanisch (1969)

Why it resonates

Although the sentence uses the word political, it is deeply sociological in meaning. Here, political does not refer to party politics, but to power, social structures, and collective responsibility. It reminds us that personal experiences—such as stress, inequality, exclusion, or mental distress—are not merely individual issues but are shaped by social norms, institutions, and systems.

For me, this sentence continues to matter because it bridges lived experience with sociological understanding. It encourages us to look beyond individual stories and ask how society itself produces these conditions, and therefore how social change must also be collective, ethical, and structural. I am currently working for the Mental Wellbeing of Youth and Adolescents and it gives me a clear picture of the critical situation as well as help bridge the gap between generations.

This also applies to individuals, groups & institutions: never mind what they say, watch what they do & their outcomes.

Art Kleiner's book on the Core Group illuminates this for organisations.

A powerful insight for almost every area of inquiry & social action.

Beer, Stafford (2002). "What is cybernetics?". Kybernetes. 31 (2): 209–219. doi:10.1108/03684920210417283. ISSN 0368-492X.

In was exposed to the content in 2012, since then I have often used the excerpt as a foundational lens to understand human relations, particularly in relation to equality, subtle and fluid forms of inequality, freedom, and human rights. For example, I have witnessed in education systems, some children employ elaborated linguistic codes in speech and writing, which earned better teachers’ perceptions of ability engendered access to academic opportunities such as scholarships. In contrast, children who use restricted codes were subtly disadvantaged, not through explicit exclusion but through institutional expectations that privileged certain forms of expression. Dominant groups continually define and redefine what constitutes legitimate social capital at different historical moments, while marginalised groups must renegotiate their identities and strategies in order to access opportunities. In the context of global migration, similar patterns are evident: citizens from economically and politically powerful nations are often described as expatriates when they relocate abroad, whereas individuals from less developed countries are frequently labelled as (il)legal immigrants. These distinctions reflect underlying power relations rather than neutral classifications.

Simmel, Georg. 1910. How is Society Possible? American Journal of Sociology 16 (3): 372-391.

This is a fundamental question for any sociologist, regardless of their area of specialisation. Without it, sociology could not exist.

You see, I grew up on a council estate in Salford, Greater Manchester - an area ranked in the top 10% most deprived LSOAs in England according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2025.

Today, the Government’s own figures show that, in Salford, over 5,000 people remain on the housing waiting list and nearly 1,000 children are living in temporary accommodation.

Meanwhile, 22% of those aged 16-24 are economically inactive - not in education, employment or training - a stark contrast to the 13% national average.

My family, including my mum and brothers, are among these statistics, entrenched in poverty and deprivation.

Yet, I am fortunate to be one of the few who have escaped this reality - those of us born into postcodes that too often brand their identities onto our future possibilities.

Despite limited horizons, I held high aspirations and an ambition for the pursuit of knowledge.

I am in receipt of an ESRC Widening Participation Scholarship pursuing a PhD at Cambridge University; a scholarship designed to improve access to, and participation in, postgraduate research, aimed at those from underrepresented backgrounds.

My research, "Devolution: The Promise and Pitfalls for British Democracy", seeks to reclaim the politics of place and social class, as sociological phenomena which demand theoretical and empirical attention after decades of neglect within the discipline.

Between reading and writing about whether British democracy, and by extension, devolution, diminishes or restores dignity and agency, suppresses or amplifies the seldom-heard voices of fractured and forgotten communities; I have been compelled to reflect on my own positionality, between where I came from and where I find myself today.

Like Bourdieu, I strive to reconcile my seemingly paradoxical worlds... A working-class female, born and raised on a council estate; now, an intellectual elite attending a world-class university.

While I may have my seat, at the so-called high table in the ivory tower that is Cambridge, I sit at it, to challenge and change the systems of privilege and power from within.

That, for me, is the purpose and promise of widening participation: the transformation of knowledge production and dissemination.

I became aware of this through sociology as something I already knew intuitively, in the distance through smoke. It came as a hammer-blow to know it consciously as a world-view.

Alan Gay

'If you can't see there's a problem there isn't a problem '

I've carried this wisdom throughout my life to date..

The world alone. Today, when revolutions are impossible and bloody wars loom, when capitalism is unsure of its rights and the working class is in retreat, when the lightning progress of science makes future centuries hauntingly present, when the future is more present than the present, when distant galaxies are on my doorstep. My fellow creature, my brother. Where do we start? But start what? God created heaven and earth, sure, but that's too easy. We should put it better: Say that the limits of language are the world's limits, that the limits of my language are my world's limits, and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it. And one inevitable and mysterious day, death will come and abolish these limits, and there will be no questions nor answers. It will all be a blur. But if by chance things come into focus again, it may only be with the advent of conscience. Everything will follow from there."

Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)

Why it matters to me?-> I remember the moment vividly. It was an indistinguishable sweltering summer day. A phase in my life as a MA Sociology student, at the height of Covid19 pandemic, where I was questioning what I might have to offer in this discipline a lot. And serendipitously there it was, in a cinema I decided to watch in order to take my mind off the pile of pending academic readings collecting my quiet sense of doubt as layers of dust, I found my calling for sociological imagination. In this monologue which (in my interpretation of it) felt like it had the magnanimity to explain the very essence of human existence-from macro societies to micro individual selves and rootlike networks that connect all subjects and objects in the universe, I found a sense of purpose in why I love and do sociology. Godard (1967) was right. In a world collapsing with hatred and divisiveness all we can do is take a moment and truly look at/listen to all our neighbors with empathy and understanding-and in doing so we will arrive at love. And hence, even though this quote is from a piece of cinematic media not sociology per say, it has become for me an unexpected gem where I regularly draw sociological inspiration form.

Deleuze & Guattari at Vincennes, 1975-76

John Donne, Meditations XVII, 1624.

— Dr Abel Mavura

Why it resonates

This sentence matters to me because it shows that homelessness is not just about individual misfortune but about how urban space is organised to welcome some bodies and displace others. It captures how design, policy, and everyday regulation quietly decide who is allowed to dwell in the city and who is constantly told to move on. For my work on homelessness and urban marginality, it is a reminder that inequality is written into streets, benches, doorways, and underpasses not only into statistics or policies and that changing cities means rethinking how they script belonging and exclusion.

I still remember the excitement of reading A Thousand Plateaus for the first time. D&G kept reminding us of a possibility: that sociology could cross heterogeneous territories and stubborn boundaries, thinking with the world in and through becoming.

This sentence by Giovanni Arrighi is the neatest formulation I know of the role that sociologists and intellectuals can assume in relation to social movements and society at large.

Freeman E (2007) Still after. South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3): 495–500

This has been so central in how I have explored and moved forward with queer theory in cultural sociology. It gives a steer on methodology, theory, epistemology generally. It has been a guiding light for my work

E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (1956)

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L.J.D. (1992, p. 201). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Polity Press

I came across this years ago; it has summed up and shaped both my teaching and research interests.

Niang, Sophie Marie. "In defence of what’s there: Notes on scavenging as methodology." Feminist Review 136, no. 1 (2024): 52-66.

This article is just a powerhouse of critical posiiton on methodology and the very foundations of knowledge production. This sentence encapsulates the argument but it's so artful in the process

Keaney, J., 2023. Making gaybies: Queer reproduction and multiracial feeling. Duke University Press.

I love the terminology here, sparkling makes those 'fields' dance for me and returns the liveness of humans to the equation in the way the argument of this sentence (and book) is demanding.

Bourdieu, P. (1991) "Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field", Comparative Social Research, 13: 1–44.

====

This sentence succinctly captures the social functions of religious classification and the interrelations among different levels of sociological analysis.

Reed, L., & Stella, M. (2024). ‘To raise a village, fall far from the tree’: Methods for queer kinship pasts, presents and futures. Sexualities, 0(0).

I like that this offers a quite simple statement of how we can understand - and must retain - complexity. Queer theory can get bogged down in endless sentences of conditionals, this cuts through that to the heart of what happens when dealing with norms and ideals and ambition for difference - and relationality between people.

Ebook Social Research Methodology and Methods for Emerging Researchers. 2021

Wise Owls Dublin Ireland.

ISBN 978-1-5272-9308-3

Co-authored by Dr Marjorie Fitzpatrick and Dr. Teresa Whitaker.

Bauman Z. 2000 Liquid Modernity

It has Agency vs. Structure,

Inherited Conditions, Context, and Materialism (and in original form sexism [men]) all in one sentence.

Mark Fisher (Capital Realism, 2022, Zero Books)

“It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

Fredric Jameson (Future City, New Left Review)

I first came across this phrase/sentence reading Capital Realism Mark Fisher's brilliant polemic. The late great Fisher credits the quote, which he uses, in a remixed form not unlike a textual sample, to name the opening chapter of CR, to Jameson and Zizek. I have included the Jameson version. The Zizek version is longer and somewhat more pulled apart and can be found in the opening paragraph of The Spectre of Ideology.

Regardless, this sentence is perfect in that it is simple, thought provoking, endlessly quotable, and, as we watch/experience late stage capitalism destroy everything, sadly true.

from 'Racialization in the ‘Zone of Ambiguity’ by Brett St Louis in

Racialization : Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Karim Murji, and John Solomos, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/suss/detail.action?docID=1073520.

A rarely quoted passage from a foundational text. As the translators note in their Preface to Volume 41 (p. xxi), "Marx's and Engels' letters make it possible to follow the different stages in the writing of Capital and to see how, in the process of preparing the second instalment of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx exceeded the original planned limits of the manuscript."

It is a seemingly impossible, yet nonetheless courageous claim in an era when all totalising systems of value appear to have been shattered—one that, I believe, we all truly need.

Judith Butler, Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence (2004, p. 23)

This became a bit of a North Star since my doctorate: whose undoing is recognised, and by whose design?

The idea from Niklas Luhmann is insightful for sociology because it shifts the focus from individual intentions to the structures of communication that shape social life. By looking at how communications connect to further communications, sociologists can better understand how institutions like politics, law, or science maintain their own logics and reproduce themselves over time. Individuals remain necessary participants, but this perspective highlights that social order emerges from communicative processes rather than from isolated actions alone. Christian Morgner

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 1999: 1

A salutary inspiration and a reminder of the harms we can do as researchers, as well as an opening to do research otherwise.

[Die Politik bedeutet ein starkes langsames Bohren von harten Brettern mit Leidenschaft und Augenmaß zugleich.]

Weber, Politics as a Vocation

W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

from the end of this history-making book.

Les Back, University of Glasgow.

Simone Weil

quoted in Simone Petriment Simone Weil: A Life, 1976 p. 462

Sophie Bishop Influencer Creep: how optimisation, authenticity, and self-brandingtransform creative culture Univeristy of California Press, 2025 p. 207.

Linton Kwesi Johnson (1976), Jamaican Rebel Music. Race & Class, XVII. 4: 397.

This is an article was developed from Linton's sociology dissertation on reggae that he wrote as a student at Goldsmiths College in the early seventies.

Personal Construct: It is advisable for the individual in society to take part in one sociological event or conference, in order to shape society for a better tomorrow.

Bourdieu, P. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage

This sentence resonates deeply with me because it transforms how we see disability. Rather than a deficit or limitation, it reveals disability as a profound lens through which to understand human life and relationships. It beautifully but powerfully unsettles dominant assumptions that push disabled bodies and experiences to the margins, and instead illuminates disability as a source of insight, creativity, and social transformation. I am especially moved by the phrase “beautifully disruptive”. It captures how disability can quietly disturb what we take for granted, opening new ways of understanding care, intimacy, community, and what it means to live fully. As a sociologist, it reminds me that the margins often hold the deepest truths about society, inviting us to listen more carefully, think more humbly, and remain open to voices that transform how we understand everyday life.

From the first book on sociological method.

I first heard this sentence in the documentary Sociology is a martial art (La sociologie est un sport de combat) on Pierre Bourdieu, and it has stayed with me ever since. For me, it is a reminder that sociology reveals the invisible social forces that shape our lives. Understanding these constraints does not eliminate them, but it gives us distance from them. At the same time, this knowledge should not be used as a weapon against others, but as a way of becoming more reflexive about the structures that shape us all. In this sense, sociology becomes a lesson in freedom: the knowledge of our constraints is the beginning of freedom. Knowing that one is unfree is a form of freedom, and this idea, which runs throughout Bourdieu's work, has shaped my way of thinking and teaching.

― Margaret Mead, as quoted in Teacher's Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion (1958) by Millard Dale Baughman, p. 69

Every time I come back to this quote, it brings me somewhere slightly different. At first, I always feel the obvious sting of truth: our lives are not ours to design, and any arbitrary design imposed on a life will always carry at least a touch of cruelty. There’s also the longing for play later in life, and the wish to minimise regret.

But then I start to wonder whether Mead’s claim still holds. I’m in my mid‑forties, doing a PhD in a discipline I didn’t even study before. Yes, I also do the work at home and the minding for my family, but even that is not only work. There is so much fun, curiosity, and learning woven into my mid-life days. Play and learning didn’t end with the end of childhood for me.

And then, inevitably, the question of class and privilege pops up around the corner. Who gets to have this experience? Who can even think of doing a PhD at this age, never mind actually go through with it? It feels like a luxury. And yet there are the more taxing days when it feels like the opposite of luxury, days when I long for a simpler life, one where I “would have seeded everything earlier and could now just be harvesting”. On those days, the old, “arbitrary” life design starts to look almost comforting… I think about my grandparents, who worked in the same buildings and institutions their whole lives. No one expected them to retrain or “upskill.” They were considered educated enough. And then I think of the Polish Silesian miners in the 1990s, suddenly told to “re‑qualify” as the mines were closing. Those memories always brings me back to the uncomfortable side of the “lifelong learning” ideal. In my case the PhD is my choice and it’s fun, but I can’t ignore the way lifelong learning can be twisted: how, instead of freeing people, it can simply restructure the ways we’re being shown our place.

And all this is only me thinking about the learning part of Mead’s quote. I’ll happily leave it to you to unpack the “work in middle age” and “regrets in old age” parts. There’s plenty of rich terrain there too :)

The writer is W.E.B Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (p 727). He is summing up the history of the "ten million people" transported out of their country into the "new-found Eldorado of the West", their struggle for their emancipation from slavery, and their crucial role in post Civil War Southern Reconstruction, building schools, hospitals and democracy. This ended around 1873 with the development of the "psychological wage" for white workers: together with naked violence, this effectively separated the two groups of working-class people.

Understanding racialized capitalism has been a late development in my sociological life: W.E.B. Du Bois richly deserves his new-found place in the canon.

"IBM plus Reality plus Humanism=Sociology”, it is the title of the article written in 1954 by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills. 

This lapidary sentence instantly resembles with another equally powerful formula
(E=mc2) that intends to explain the mechanic of physical universe.   

Then, Mills was concerned with the rise of narrow and rigid, quantitative, and bureaucratic methods and approach in sociology, which he felt focused on data gathering rather than understanding the broader context of society. He used "IBM" as a metaphor for such technocratic approach.

I came across this catchy title, many years after it was written, in a comprehensive collection of his essays collected under equally powerful title, “Power, Politics and People”.  Since then that catchy formula stays with me as analytical and inspirational reminder.

Submitted on behalf of Leslie Sklair.

- Cal Horton (2026) “The worst thing I’ve ever experienced” – comparing experiences of affirmative and non-affirmative healthcare provision for trans adolescents in the UK" https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2025.2609952

The notion of an "exemplar in policy-based evidence-making" speaks to me so powerfully. In just a few words, Horton not only powerfully captures the inherent problem with the Cass Review in and of itself, but also identifies and critiques a wider discursive trend with enormous implications for the contemporary social world. We have now gone well beyond "fake news", and are living in a world where aesthetics of science are manipulated and exploited to justify regressive, pre-determined policy decisions. This is a trend that requires urgent sociological attention, and Horton's intervention both names the problem and issues an implicit call to action.

All contemporary relationships as reflected in social statics and social dynamics, have invariably been defined by perceptions of exceptionalism, superiority, inferiority and domination. Social Darwinism, a possible extention of Thomas postulation, in a way, is rooted in societies with growth from families, communities and societies of all ethnicity and races. Charles O Okwuwa

- Ge, L. (2025). Ambivalent desiring subjects: young women, agency and post-(socialist-)feminist sensibilities in China. Feminist Theory.

This sentence beautifully captures the messy, non-linear reality of social progress. It asks sociologists to stop viewing historical shifts merely in terms of "progress" versus "backlash." Instead, it encourages us to see how individuals actively react to the histories they inherit, navigating a complex web of "continuities and fractures" to make sense of their present reality.

As a scholar-activist this quote challenges me to prioritise integrity, intentionality and a commitment to actions grounded in humanity.

For me, that line names a shared problem across disability, welfare, and global development: when injustice is reframed as “misfortune”, the response becomes charity rather than rights. Whether it is disabled people, other groups who may require welfare, or communities shaped by colonial histories, “support” is too often conditional, paternalistic, and discretionary. As a sociologist, I am concerned with how this obscures the structural production of inequality; as a disability studies researcher, I see how the charity model entrenches dependence and diminishes dignity. Justice, by contrast, demands secure entitlements, redistribution, and transformation of the systems that make people reliant on goodwill in the first place. It is especially powerful in teaching - sociology and theology students alike often begin by asking, “But isn’t charity a good thing?”. I have found that this challenge startles them, opening up a deeper conversation about justice.

C. Wright Mills (1959, p. 3)