Edward Alsworth Ross Quotes

Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from the pit's mouth or mill-gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best.... They are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality... They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.

The role of the schoolmaster is to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading board.

A self-conscious society will therefore endeavor to limit sect forming by providing for the widest possible diffusion of secular knowledge.

During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power.

In a word, removing control farther away from the ordinary citizen and taxpayer is tantamount to giving the intelligent, far-sighted and public spirited elements in society a longer lever to work with.

There may come a time in the career of every sociologist when it is his solemn duty to raise hell.

Already I notice a feeling of 'If this be sociology, Good Lord deliver us.' However sociology has endured many things like it and my faith in its ultimate triumph never wavers.