Peter Berger

"Friendship demands vulnerability and trust."

"Love is both a personal experience and a social institution."

"Peace requires more than the absence of conflict."

"The individual appears now as a mere accident of the social process."

"Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Society shapes us."

"We are not just in the world, we are of the world through our social constructions."

"The social world is not given in nature; it is humanly constructed and therefore can be humanly changed."

"Religious faith is a powerful force precisely because it addresses the deepest human anxieties."

"Modernity has given us unprecedented freedom, but also unprecedented anxiety."

"The process of becoming human is learning to see the world as others do."

"Every society must solve the problem of meaning-making for its members."

"We create ourselves through the stories we tell about ourselves."

"The secular world offers liberation but not salvation."

"Culture is the means by which we impose order on the chaos of experience."

"Childhood is the crucial period when we internalize the fundamental structures of our society."

"The sacred is that which binds us together; the profane is that which divides."

"We are simultaneously prisoners and architects of our social worlds."

"Tradition provides certainty; modernity provides choice and doubt."

"The process of socialization never truly ends; we are always learning who we are."

"Legitimation is the process by which we convince ourselves that the way things are is how they should be."

"To understand society is to understand the delicate balance between structure and agency."

"Religion provides the ultimate shelter against meaninglessness."

"The modern individual is characterized by an unprecedented consciousness of choice."

"Pluralism creates a marketplace of ideas where nothing is sacred."

"We are condemned to interpret our own existence."

"The process of becoming a self is fundamentally social, not individual."

"Modern consciousness is characterized by vertigo before a seemingly infinite array of possibilities."

"Every social role contains within it a repertoire of acceptable behaviors."

"The tyranny of the modern age is not oppression but choice."

"Sociology allows us to see the hand of society in the most intimate corners of our lives."