What is a ‘good’ sentence in sociology?

To mark its 75th anniversary, the British Sociological Association put that question to its members. Not the most cited argument, or the most theoretically sophisticated intervention, but a line that had stayed with them. A sentence that had shaped how they think sociologically.

The response was joyful. Contributions arrived from across career stages, continents, and specialisms. People shared sentences they had first encountered as undergraduates, lines they had returned to across the course of their careers, and fragments from surprising and unlikely sources. Some came with a brief attribution. Others came with a story.

What emerged was something more interesting than a shortlist.

The sentences that came up most

Some contributions were, as you might expect, familiar. Foucault’s “Where there is power, there is resistance” attracted 25 likes, among the highest in the Classic Theory section, with Bethany Simmonds writing that this “short quote ignited my sociological imagination, empowering me to enact agency via technologies of the self.”

In the Contemporary Voices section, Donna Haraway’s call in Staying with the Trouble to “make trouble, to stir up potent responses to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Nick Fox) and , and Carol Hanisch’s “The personal is political” (Dr Neelam C. Dey) each drew 25 likes, making them the most engaged contributions in that category.

C. Wright Mills appeared more than any other single thinker. Victoria Nunn described the moment Mills’s sentence from The Sociological Imagination “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both” first landed for her: “As an undergraduate in 2002, this sentence was the moment sociology clicked for me, becoming more than just theory.” The same sentence was contributed independently by another member months later, at the other end of the Padlet. Some sentences, it seems, find their people more than once.

Across all four sections, the entry that attracted the most engagement was Mark Doidge’s winning nomination of Marx’s line from the Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” It received 34 likes.

Mark wrote that for him: “Sociology is not only the discipline of social change, but it is also the discipline of social action.” One commenter described it as an “‘ah ha’ moment, an awakening.” It is a sentence that has, apparently, been having that effect for a long time.

What people said about the sentences

This is where the activity became genuinely revealing. Members did not just share sentences; they located them in moments.

Bethany Simmonds wrote that before reading Foucault, “I, like so many, internalised experiences of discrimination and abuse, as an inevitable personal trouble.” Tom Hall’s contribution of Bourdieu’s “The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden” prompted a first-year undergraduate to comment that she had been “born in 1969” and that “this new lens gives me hope to be a better changemaker but also anger issues!” Tallulah Sutton wove Bourdieu’s own words about his “miraculous” trajectory directly into a reflection on growing up in one of England’s most deprived areas: “I sit at it [the high table], to challenge and change the systems of privilege and power from within.”

The sentence, in this sense, is not simply something read. It is something used, returned to, and reworked.

The canon, but not only the canon

One of the most striking features of the Padlet was its range. Alongside the expected names, contributors brought in thinkers who rarely appear on undergraduate reading lists. Morteza Hashemi submitted a passage from Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, written six centuries ago, on how habit and custom shape character: he described it as “one of the earliest indications of thinking about the social through social constructionism.” W.E.B. Du Bois appeared three times, contributed independently by different members, including Bridget Fowler’s careful excavation of Black Reconstruction in America and Les Back’s nomination of the closing lines from The Souls of Black Folk: “Let the ears of a guilty people tingle with truth, and seventy millions sigh for the righteousness which exalteth nations, in this drear day when human brotherhood is mockery and a snare.”

Mary Shek brought Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And Simone Weil appeared in the Unexpected Gems section: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” drew 19 likes, with two separate comments, “wow….” and “very apt for the world today”, arriving weeks apart from people who had clearly found it at different moments. Alongside these, Julia Bailey’s “Who benefits from this and how?” with 20 likes emerged as the most engaged contribution in the Personal Inspirations category.

It was a joy to read.

Unexpected gems

The final section of the Padlet was perhaps the most fun. It included a passage from Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), John Donne’s Meditation XVII, a line from a Stafford Beer cybernetics paper, and a remark attributed to Philip Abrams in a Durham tutorial in the mid-1970s: “If you can’t see there’s a problem there isn’t a problem.” One member reported meeting an old hippie in a pub in the North Pennines who defined sociology as “looking for justice and finding there none.” Another offered simply: “Culture is peer pressure from dead people.”

The entry with the most engagement in this category was Les Back’s nomination of Simone Weil’s “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” which attracted 19 likes, with comments arriving weeks apart from people who seemed to have encountered it at exactly the right moment.

What the activity revealed

The most widely recognised sentences, and the engagement data makes this visible, were not always the most personally meaningful to every contributor. What the Padlet shows, again and again, is that a sentence matters because of the relationship a person has to it: when they encountered it, what it allowed them to name, how it travelled with them into their teaching, their research, or their life.

As Petra Mäkelä wrote of Judith Butler’s “We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something”: this had become “a bit of a North Star since my doctorate.” Rachel Benchekroun described returning regularly to Daniel Chambliss on the mundanity of excellence “to remind myself that small, careful, consistent actions are what ultimately create impact in social research and life more generally.”

This is how sociology circulates. Not only through journals and textbooks, but through fragments. Through lines that are remembered, repeated, and reworked. Through teaching, research, and the ordinary moments in between.

While one contribution attracted the highest level of engagement overall, the activity resisted settling on a single ‘best’ sentence. Different lines resonate in different ways, across themes, career stages, and personal trajectories.

That said, the contribution that attracted the most member engagement, was Marx’s call to action from 1845. But the real finding of this activity might be simpler than a winner. When you ask sociologists to share the sentences that stayed with them, they share themselves.

Not just the sentences they keep, but the reasons they kept them.

Thank you to everyone who contributed. We hope to carry on these conversations about what sociology means to us as a community in the work we do together.

The Best Sentence in Sociology activity was run by the BSA Mid-Career Forum as part of the BSA’s 75th anniversary programme. The full Padlet remains available to browse.