Erving Goffman Quotes

#1. Although the pictures shown here cannot be taken as representative of gender behavior in real life... one can probably make a significant negative statement about them, namely, that as pictures they are not perceived as peculiar and unnatural.

Erving Goffman

#2. Gender, not religion, is the opiate of the masses.

Erving Goffman

#3. The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

Erving Goffman

#4. We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image, we act based on how others might see us.

Erving Goffman

#5. Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes.

Erving Goffman

#6. The model of "social order." Briefly, a social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms that regulates the way in which persons pursue objectives.

Erving Goffman

#7. Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

Erving Goffman

#8. 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 a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

Erving Goffman

#9. The issue becomes not whether a person has experience with a stigma of his own, because he has, but rather how many varieties he has had his own experience with.

Erving Goffman

#10. 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 his cell.

Erving Goffman

#11. So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

Erving Goffman

#12. Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

Erving Goffman

#13. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify

Erving Goffman

#14. The world, in truth, is a wedding.

Erving Goffman

#15. Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

Erving Goffman

#16. 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 kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

Erving Goffman

#17. Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

Erving Goffman

#18. There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

Erving Goffman

#19. 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 ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

Erving Goffman

#20. In reviewing his own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for him to account for his coming to the beliefs and practices that he now has regarding his own kind and normals.

Erving Goffman