Erving Goffman Quotes

14 quotes in 271 categories

• Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes.
• Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.
• The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is…
• The world, in truth, is a wedding.
• Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on…
• Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.
• Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you…
• A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one…
• Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little…
• All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify
• The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.
• Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like…
• And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special…
• The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different…

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