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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.

From Emile Durkheim

Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular.

From Emile Durkheim

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.

From Emile Durkheim

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.

From Emile Durkheim

There are two types of men: the great and the small.

From Emile Durkheim

If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.

From Emile Durkheim

A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.

From Emile Durkheim

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life.

From Emile Durkheim

Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.

From Emile Durkheim

From the physical point of view, a man is nothing more than a system of cells, or from the mental point of view, than a system of representations; in either case, he differs only in degree from animals.

From Emile Durkheim

Emile Durkheim

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