Peter Berger

"To be modern is to experience a kind of perpetual displacement."

"Language shapes thought, and thought shapes social action."

"The individual appears as both subject and object of the social process."

"Every person is a carrier of culture, whether they recognize it or not."

"The process of becoming human involves learning to accept the contingency of existence."

"Modern society creates unprecedented opportunities for self-fashioning and unprecedented anxieties about authenticity."

"The sociologist must be willing to see through the facades of social institutions."

"Religion provides a sacred canopy under which human meaning-making occurs."

"We are simultaneously the products and producers of our social world."

"Consciousness is always consciousness of something, always intentional."

"The modern individual is peculiarly free and peculiarly homeless."

"Institutions begin as habits, become customs, and end as prisons."

"Society is a human product, but once produced, becomes an objective reality."

"The sociologist sees the general in the particular."

"Our biographies are embedded in history; our psychology in society."

"Meaning is not found in the universe; it is constructed by human beings."

"Every social role involves a performance, a presentation of self."

"We inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously, each with its own logic."

"The sacred and profane are not opposites but dimensions of human experience."

"Modernity has fragmented what tradition held together."

"To be human is to live within structures of meaning we create."

"The question is not whether society shapes us, but how we shape society."

"Understanding requires stepping outside one's own taken-for-granted world."

"Modern man suffers from a kind of spiritual vertigo."

"Language is the primary means by which we construct social reality."

"The individual is both imprisoned and liberated by social structures."

"Sociological imagination reveals the connection between private troubles and public issues."

"We are condemned to meaning; we cannot escape interpretation."

"Every culture is a response to the fundamental human need for order."

"Pluralism is not the enemy of tradition but its necessary modern form."