Peter L. Berger Quotations

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.

The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture

In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state

It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term

We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude

Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy

When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization

Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally.

There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved

If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes

But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.

Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.

Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance

I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways.

Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.

If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe.

Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind.

India is the most religious country in the world, Sweden is the most secular country in the world, and America is a country of Indians ruled by Swedes.

To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.

There is an intrinsic linkage between socialism and economic inefficiency.

There are times in history when the dark drums of God can barely be heard amid the noises of this world. Then it is only in moments of silence, which are rare and brief, that their beat can be faintly discerned. There are other times. These are the times when God is heard in rolling thunder, when the earth trembles and the treetops bend under the force of [God’s] voice. It is not given to men [and women] to make God speak. It is only given to them to live and to think in such a way that, if God’s thunder should come, they will not have stopped their ears.

If a socialist economy is opened up to increasing degrees of market forces, a point will be reached at which democratic governance becomes a possibility.

F. A. Hayek is probably the most prominent advocate of capitalism in the present period.

If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe

In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.

In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility.

Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being-human or otherwise-i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man.

An economy oriented toward production for market exchange provides the optimal conditions for long-lasting and ever-expanding productive capacity based on modern technology.

East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people.

Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.

The human organism is thus still developing biologically while already standing in a relationship to its environmont. In other words, the process of becoming man takes place in an interrelationship with an environment. (...) From the moment of birth, man's organismic development, and indeed a large part of his biological being as such, are subjected to continuing socially determined interference.

If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.

In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness.

He who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter--until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company.

On the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism. On the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal. In other words, man's experience of himself always hovers in a balance between being and having a body, a balance that must be redressed again and again.

Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.

He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.

Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.