Robert D. Putnam Quotes

#1. Look, we ought to do this for our kids ... We ought to have a high school so that every kid who grows up here - they're all our kids - gets a good high school education.

Robert D. Putnam

#2. Parental wealth is especially important for social mobility, because it can provide informal insurance that allows kids to take more risks in search of more reward.

Robert D. Putnam

#3. People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.

Robert D. Putnam

#4. In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth, and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households.

Robert D. Putnam

#5. Our national myths often exaggerate the role of the individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort.

Robert D. Putnam

#6. None of the people watching 'Big Brother' will bring you chicken soup if you get sick.

Robert D. Putnam

#7. Social capital may turn out to be a prerequisite for, rather than a consequence of, effective computer-mediated communication.

Robert D. Putnam

#8. The achievement gap between children from high income and low income families is roughly 30-40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years ago. The class gap among students entering kindergarten was two to three times higher than the racial gap.

Robert D. Putnam

#9. Generally speaking, lower-tier grandparents mostly donate time, replacing parental resources, whereas upper-tier grandparents mostly donate money, supplementing parental resources

Robert D. Putnam

#10. We all know that the way to get something done is to give it to a busy person.

Robert D. Putnam

#11. TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress.

Robert D. Putnam

#12. Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph. In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference in our lives ... Social capital makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.

Robert D. Putnam

#13. Busy people tend to forgo the one activity - TV watching _ that is most lethal to community involvement

Robert D. Putnam

#14. What really matters from the point of view of social capital and civic engagement is not merely nominal membership, but active and involved membership.

Robert D. Putnam

#15. How well you do in life shouldn't depend on how well your parents did.

Robert D. Putnam

#16. People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there.

Robert D. Putnam

#17. If we think of politics as an industry, we might delight in its new "labour-saving efficiency", but if we think of politics as democratic deliberation, to leave people out is to miss the whole point of the exercise.

Robert D. Putnam

#18. Financial capital - the wherewithal for mass marketing - has steadily replaced social capital - that is, grassroots citizen networks - as the coin of the realm.

Robert D. Putnam

#19. Positive people have more friends which is a key factor of happiness and longevity.

Robert D. Putnam

#20. Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia.

Robert D. Putnam

#21. Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen.

Robert D. Putnam

#22. Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate.

Robert D. Putnam