Erving Goffman Quotes

• Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

  Erving Goffman

  Self, May, Faces

  240 Copy quote

• The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

  Erving Goffman

  Perspective, Normal, Persons

  Erving Goffman (2009). “Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity”, p.138, Simon and Schuster

  142 Copy quote

• The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

  Erving Goffman

  Fate, Self, Fundamentals

  "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,". Book by Erving Goffman, p. 252, 1959.

  146 Copy quote

• Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

  Erving Goffman

  Insane, Inmates, Asylums

  98 Copy quote

• All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

  Erving Goffman

  World, Way, Easy

  117 Copy quote

• 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

  Principles, Way, Moral

  "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life". Book by Erving Goffman, p. 13, 1959.

  104 Copy quote

• A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases we have a sense in which the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be performer and observer of the same show. Presumably he introcepts or incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that even in their absence his conscience requires him to act in a socially proper way.

  Erving Goffman

  Taken, Reality, May

  125 Copy quote

• Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

  Erving Goffman

  Identity, Normal, Reactions

  109 Copy quote

• Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wide social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks

  Erving Goffman

  Identity, Cracks, World

  107 Copy quote

• And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

  Erving Goffman

  Believe, Self, Special

  76 Copy quote

• Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

  Erving Goffman

  Meaningful, Groups, Pilots

  Erving Goffman (2017). “Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates”, p.17, Routledge

  81 Copy quote

• The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have not quite extended to him in the first place. A PHANTOM ACCEPTANCE is thus allowed to provide the base for a PHANTOM NORMALCY.

  Erving Goffman

  Acceptance, Different, Normalcy

  84 Copy quote

• 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.

  Erving Goffman

  Men, Cells, May

  Erving Goffman (1969). “Where the action is: three essays”, Lane, Allen

  63 Copy quote

• 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

  Reality, Agents, Alive

  "Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction". Book by Erving Goffman, p. 38, 1971.

  56 Copy quote

• The world, in truth, is a wedding.

  Erving Goffman

  World, Truth Is

  50 Copy quote

• Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes.

  Erving Goffman

  Men, Animal, Way

  43 Copy quote

• When persons are present to one another they can function not merely as physical instruments but also as communicative ones. This possibility, no less than the physical one, is fateful for everyone concerned and in every society appears to come under strict normative regulation, giving rise to a kind of communication traffic order.

  Erving Goffman

  Communication, Order, Giving

  Erving Goffman (2008). “Behavior in Public Places”, p.23, Simon and Schuster

  39 Copy quote

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

  Erving Goffman

  Taken, Mean, Exercise

  Erving Goffman (1981). “Forms of Talk”, p.1, University of Pennsylvania Press

  54 Copy quote

• Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.

  Erving Goffman

  Needs, Able, Way

  Erving Goffman (2005). “Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior”, p.95, AldineTransaction

  34 Copy quote

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