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Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

— Erving Goffman

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More quotes by Erving Goffman

Stigma - the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

Only a schmuck studies his own life.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

Erving Goffman (1971)

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All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
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And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

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Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Erving Goffman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.