35 Quotes by Erving Goffman

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

We are all just actors trying to control and manage our public image, we act based on how others might see us.

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

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.

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.

The world, in truth, is a wedding.

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.

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.

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