Quotes About Anomie

Anomie is not a danger only for the young; it may surface in what is now conventionally called the "crisis of mid-life" or anywhere else.

it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

the elements of a modern creation myth are all around us. It is harmful because it contributes to the subtle but pervasive quality of disorientation in modern life that the pioneering French sociologist Émile Durkheim referred to as "anomie": the sense of not fitting in, which is an inescapable condition of those who have no conception of what it is they are supposed to fit into.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

Anomie has to be someone there, with the quote on the window and the stolen drawing and everything. But you never wanted to believe me, that that place was bad news, because of her.

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable.

We have paid a price for our inclusiveness, but but we have bought ourselves a more humane society, with greater opportunity for racial minorities, women, gay people, the handicapped, and others - that is, for most people. And even if some people think the price was too steep, we can't go back, either to a pre-consumer society or to ethnically homogeneous enclaves. All we can do is search for ways that we might reduce our anomie without excluding large classes of people.

When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and anomie.

Sometimes I feel entirely disassociated from what I do. It's a malady of the modern age.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.

loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair that shaped so much literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship in the twentieth century.

Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.

Anomie is the condition of our time. We are poisoned by images, an endless sinister fallout of metaphors, full of purpose but devoid of meaning. Like any addict our means of escape is our prison; the remedy is, in fact, a deadly numbing toxin. When the time comes to feel we have lost the neural pathway. Things touch us without our knowing.

Every human being needs a set of norms and rules, traditions and customs, transmitted from the older to the younger; without those norms, the individual would never achieve the fullness of his humanity, but would be reduced to the condition of the 'Wild Child", condemned to anomie, in other words to the absence of all law and all order- an absence that can create severe disturbances.

Perfectionism or Anomie. Always be right in everything you do. The perfectionist rule always involves an imposed measurement. The fear and avoidance of the negative is the organizing principle of life. The members live according to an externalized image. No one ever measures up. In the less-than-human family, there are no rules—the children have no structure to guide them.

It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word `kindness' was liking rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

Two terms describing states of social pathology apply also to conditions that make flow difficult to experience: anomie and alienation. Anomie—