The idealist's program of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind,… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share
To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
“I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain,… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share
Since freedom is not a fixed thing that can be grasped and held once for all, but a growth, any particular society, such as… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
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… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
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… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins… — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it. — Charles Horton Cooley Copy Share Image
