Charles Horton Cooley

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.”

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

“To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.”