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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.