Quotes by Charles Horton Cooley - Page 2

One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Men
Blow
Self
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The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Ambition
Passion
Self
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A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Men
Conviction
Fluency
Grace
Logical
Oratory
Order
Surface
Tact
Avail
Decorative
Forcible
Merely
Speaker
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Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Antagonism
Class
Country
Dependence
Fraternal
Free Country
Hands
Pity
Classes
Healthier
Mutually
Perhaps
Poorer
Respecting
Richer
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If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Accepted
Broken
Character
Divine
Hypocrite
Impression
Pain
Painful
Unity
Discrepancy
Hardly
Revolts
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We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Men
Ashamed
Brave
Cowardly
Eye
Gross
Imagine
Presence Of Mind
Refined
Share
Straightforward
Evasive
Eyes
Imagining
Judgments
Presence
Seem
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Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Government
Church
Function
Human Freedom
Needs
Reconstruction
Perform
Churches
Contribute
Fail
Industries
Properly
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By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Peace
Attitude
Giving
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A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Character
Looks
Purpose
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The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Issues
Mind
Obscurity
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The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Appreciation
Smile
Causes
Isolation
Misery
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If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Feelings
Giving
Self
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If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Giving
Hero
Self
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I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Doe
Ego
Thinking
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The idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that some one or some class is not getting a fair chance.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Class
Ideas
Play
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When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Pain
Relief
Responsibility
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Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as our own, always appears partly free and partly unfree. In so far as it favors, in every child, the development of his highest possibilities, it is free, but where it falls short of this it is not.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Freedom
Children
Fall
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Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Games
Self
Thinking
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The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Negative
Political
Reform
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A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Book
Past
Reading
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It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Mean
Retirement
Successful
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We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale - identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Communication
Ideas
Lying
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If the man succeeds in becoming indifferent to the opinions of his neighbors he runs into another danger, that of a distorted and extravagant self of the pride sort, since by the very process of gaining independence and immunity from the stings of depreciation and misunderstanding, he has perhaps lost that wholesome deference to some social tribunal that a man cannot dispense with and remain quite sane.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Running
Men
Pride
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It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Men
Iron
Views
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In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Reflection
Self
Suffering
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In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Men
Book
Writing
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So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Discipline
Mean
Self
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One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Communication
Loss
Pain
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There is perhaps no sort of self more subject to dangerous egotism than that which deludes itself with the notion that it is not a self at all, but something else. It is well to beware of persons who believe that the cause, the mission, the philanthropy, the hero, or whatever it may be that they strive for, is outside of themselves, so that they feel a certain irresponsibility, and are likely to do things which they would recognize as wrong if done in behalf of an acknowledged self.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Believe
Hero
Self
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Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.
Charles Horton Cooley / Sociologist
Nature
Home
Children
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