Robert Putnam Quotes

#1. Making a decision to sell is the most difficult thing we do.

Walter Schloss

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

Robert D. Putnam

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

Robert D. Putnam

#4. To say he has a glass chin is an insult to glass.

Larry Merchant

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

Robert D. Putnam

#6. I feel like I have a bowling ball sitting on my hoo-ha.

Jessica Simpson

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

Robert D. Putnam

#8. I've got nothing to prove and I piss off all the right people.

The Coquette

#9. Most Americans watch Friends rather than having friends.

Robert Putnam

#10. You must lance an ulcer to heal it. You must tear down parts of an old building to restore it, and so it is with a sensual life that has no spirit in it.

Rumi

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Robert D. Putnam

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

Robert D. Putnam

#15. 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

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

Robert D. Putnam

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Robert D. Putnam

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

Robert D. Putnam

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

Robert D. Putnam

#22. 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

#23. It's like saying to a drowning man: What a pity, what a pity! If you had only let me teach you how to swim! Everybody wants to right the world, nobody wants help his neighbor. They want to make a man of you without taking your body into consideration. It's all cockeyed.

Henry Miller

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

Robert D. Putnam

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

Robert D. Putnam

#26. I helped you help me, you helped me to help you, that's the way it must be or the very idea of help would be obsolete. I always thought that being helped was a loss of control, but you must allow someone to help you, you must want someone to help you, and only then can the act begin.

Cecelia Ahern

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

Robert D. Putnam

#28. 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

#29. Maybe I'm making this up, but my portions seem to be smaller lately. I'm not sure why. The hiking and running on the tracker keep me fit. If anything, I should be getting more food, not less. It must be my imagination.

Ally Condie

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

Robert D. Putnam

#31. 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

#32. I've worked with Woody Allen twice and he was like, "Whatever you want to change, it's up to you. If you want to change the words, make them your own."

George Clooney