Peter Conrad Quotes

#1. Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.

Peter Conrad

#2. The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Peter Conrad

#3. Public "facts" are not like pebbles on the beach, lying in the sun and waiting to be seen. They must instead be picked, polished, shaped and packaged. Finally ready for display they the bear the marks of their shapers.

Peter Conrad

#4. ...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...

Peter Conrad

#5. What each culture views as the cause of madness is dependent on its world view.

Peter Conrad

#6. All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it, an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Peter Conrad

#7. Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions - products of our own creation.

Peter Conrad

#8. [S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.

Peter Conrad

#9. Reality" is defined not as something that exists "out there" for the scientist or anyone else to discover but as a social construction that emerges from and is sustained by social interaction.

Peter Conrad