Here are the 17 best quotes explaining what sociology is.

If you go to an academic website or your .edu site, they would define sociology as the qualitative and quantitative study of society.

And they would be right.

However, there’s much more to sociology than the science aspect of it, and these 17 quotes will explain why:

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1. “The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.” -Pierre Bourdieu
2. “While economics is about how people make choices, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make.” -Bertrand Russell
3. “Sociology is primarily an act of imagination, as it is really about seeing things differently.” -Peter Berger
4. “The first wisdom of sociology is this: things are not what they seem.” -Peter Berger
5. “Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal.” -Howard S. Becker
6. “I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.” -Quincy Jones
7. “Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline - sociology - as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals.” -Richard Wall
8. “The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood.” -Pierre Bourdieu
9. “The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion.” -C. Wright Mills
10. “Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?” -C. Wright Mills
11. “There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.” -Emile Durkheim
12. “The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.” -Zygmunt Bauman
13. “History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.” -W. H. Auden
14. “It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.” -Emile Durkheim
15. “I think sociologists are among the best at thinking about emergence, of thinking about the ways that the society is more than the sum of the individuals. And I've found that much of the wisest writing on human social nature comes from sociology and anthropology, not from my own field of social psychology.” -Jonathan Haidt
16. “The formulation of critical theory is not an option; theories and findings in the social sciences are likely to have practice (and political) consequences regardless of whether or not the sociological observer or policy-maker decides that they can be ‘applied’ to a given practical issue.” -Anthony Giddens
17. “You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society, historical time period in which they live, personal troubles, and social issues.” -C. Wright Mills