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
Whoever makes an attempt on a man's life, on a man's liberty, on a man's honour inspires us with a feeling of horror in every way analogous to that which the believer experiences when he sees his idol profaned.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote illustrates the deep emotional response evoked by violations of personal rights and dignity.
Emile Durkheim suggests that when someone's life, freedom, or honor is threatened, it evokes a profound horror in us, similar to the outrage a believer feels when witnessing the desecration of something sacred. This reflects the importance of these fundamental aspects of human existence and the collective feelings they inspire within society.
Themes
LifeLibertyHonorHorrorCollectiveOutrage
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about human rights, one could use this quote to emphasize the inviolability of personal dignity.
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
Similar quotes
To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.
Stanley HauerwasRead
On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.
Whittaker ChambersRead
Try to understand what I am saying: everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is.
G. I. GurdjieffRead
Some of the greatest uprisings and consequent civil wars in Mexico have centered squarely on the ownership of land.
Wole SoyinkaRead
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
Thomas HardyRead
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
Archibald MacleishRead