Pitirim Sorokin Quotes

[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe.

Either the conscious intellect is impotent, or is not sufficiently strong, or is not the factor positively connected with altruistic phenomenon generally or their sublime form particularly.

The resort to human flesh, often after months of ever-increasing hunger pangs, appeared to be an animallike reaction without painful emotional overtones.

Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

Man is a conscious, rational thinker and a supra-conscious creator genius.

Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.

Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe.

The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; its depth is unfathomable, its end not yet in sight, and the whole of the Western society is involved in it. It is the crisis of a Sensate culture, now in its overripe stage, the culture that has dominated the Western World during the last five centuries. It is also the crisis of a contractual (capitalistic) society associated with it. In this sense we are experiencing one of the sharpest turns in the historical road.

Are there quantitative aspects to the phenomena of war that can be counted? Evidently!

Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous treasure in the world.