Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

• We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Without, Idiot

• We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mind, Brave

• To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Admire, Proof

• There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to “Americanize” him.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Nothing, Foreigner

• There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Attacking, Point

• There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Seem, Insignificant

• The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Life, Uncategorized

  Tags in Powerful

• The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Doing, Idea

• So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Freedom, Means

• Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Compromise

  Tags in Means, Prudence

• Institutions – government, churches, industries, and the like – have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Freedom, Human, Need

• Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Failure, God

  Tags in Back, Sometimes

• Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Freedom, General

• Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Existing, Necessary

• Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Best, Feeling

• As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Social, Live

• A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail… Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Nothing, Everything

• Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Lives, Individual

• The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Another, Facts

• The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Struggle, Social

Charles Horton Cooley (35)

Birth:	17th August, 1864
Death:	7th May, 1929
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Sociologist

About

Charles Horton Cooley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was an American sociologist. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan, and he was a founding member and the eighth president of the American Sociological Association. In 1888, he returned for a Master's degree in political economics, with a minor in sociology. He began teaching economics and sociology at the University in the fall of 1892. Cooley went on to receive a PhD in 1894. His doctoral thesis was The Theory of Transportation in economics.

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