Maniacal suicide. —This is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
Emile DurkheimRead
When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that a society's moral standards can determine the necessity and effectiveness of laws.
Emile Durkheim's quote emphasizes the relationship between morality and law. When individuals in a society uphold strong morals, laws become less crucial as people choose to act ethically on their own. Conversely, if those morals are weak, the established laws may fail to be effective or respected, highlighting the importance of a moral foundation for societal order.
Themes
MoralityLawSocietyEthicsGovernance
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on ethics, a professor might use this quote to explain the importance of moral responsibility in society.
More from Emile Durkheim
All quotes →Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
Emile DurkheimRead
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
Emile DurkheimRead
A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
Emile DurkheimRead
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
Emile DurkheimRead
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
Emile DurkheimRead
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