Top 40 Peter L. Berger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture.”

— Peter L. Berger

2. “He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.”

— Peter L. Berger

3. “If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.”

— Peter L. Berger

4. “Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.”

— Peter L. Berger

5. “India is the most religious country in the world, Sweden is the most secular country in the world, and America is a country of Indians ruled by Swedes.”

— Peter L. Berger

6. “We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization.”

— Peter L. Berger

7. “In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.”

— Peter L. Berger

8. “There is an intrinsic linkage between socialism and economic inefficiency.”

— Peter L. Berger

9. “The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.”

— Peter L. Berger

10. “The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.”

— Peter L. Berger

11. “In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness.”

— Peter L. Berger

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12. “East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people.”

— Peter L. Berger

13. “I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.”

— Peter L. Berger

14. “It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term.”

— Peter L. Berger

15. “Human existence is, ab initio, an ongoing externalization. As man externalizes himself, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself. In the process of externalization, he projects his own meanings into reality. Symbolic universes, which proclaim that all reality is humanly meaningful and call upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence, constitute the farthest reaches of this projection.80 b.”

— Peter L. Berger

16. “The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these.”

— Peter L. Berger

17. “Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.”

— Peter L. Berger

18. “In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state.”

— Peter L. Berger

19. “To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.”

— Peter L. Berger

20. “Joy is play’s intention. When this intention is actually realized, in joyful play, the time structure of the playful universe takes on a very specific quality – namely, it becomes eternity. This is probably true of all experiences of intense joy, even when they are not enveloped in the separate reality of play. This is the final insight of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the midnight song: “All joy wills eternity – wills deep, deep eternity!”33.”

— Peter L. Berger

21. “Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.”

— Peter L. Berger

22. “Whatever happens “here below” is but a pale reflection of what takes place “up above.”

— Peter L. Berger

23. “Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.”

— Peter L. Berger

24. “There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved.”

— Peter L. Berger

25. “Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there’s no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.”

— Peter L. Berger

26. “One can’t understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive – they’re reacting to what they call secular humanism.”

— Peter L. Berger

27. “Our institute’s agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally.”

— Peter L. Berger

28. “When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.”

— Peter L. Berger

29. “Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore’s, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy.”

— Peter L. Berger

30. “I’m sure Putnam is right that there’s been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways.”

— Peter L. Berger

31. “F. A. Hayek is probably the most prominent advocate of capitalism in the present period.”

— Peter L. Berger

32. “The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance.”

— Peter L. Berger

33. “Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic.”

— Peter L. Berger

34. “In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility.”

— Peter L. Berger

35. “If a socialist economy is opened up to increasing degrees of market forces, a point will be reached at which democratic governance becomes a possibility.”

— Peter L. Berger

36. “The botanist looking at a daffodil has no reason to dispute the right of the poet to look at the same object in a very different manner. There are many ways of playing. The point is not that one denies other people’s games but that one is clear about the rules of one’s own.”

— Peter L. Berger

37. “An economy oriented toward production for market exchange provides the optimal conditions for long-lasting and ever-expanding productive capacity based on modern technology.”

— Peter L. Berger

38. “So I think one can say on empirical grounds – not because of some philosophical principle – that you can’t have democracy unless you have a market economy.”

— Peter L. Berger

39. “Theology must begin and end with the question of truth.”

— Peter L. Berger

40. “If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes.”

— Peter L. Berger

41. “Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind.”

— Peter L. Berger

42. “But we don’t have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy – which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.”

— Peter L. Berger