Personality
Stouffer is described by his family and those who knew him well as a gentleman of warmth, compassion, restless energy, high standards, depth, and a puckish sense of humor. His academic lectures, through which he often chain-smoked, were littered with allusions and quotations from Shakespeare, and these would often be accompanied by baseball statistics. Deeply intellectually curious and impatient for survey results, Prof. Stouffer would frequently sit by the IBM punched card sifting machine to see the raw answers to his queries. (These traits help to explain how he produced the classic Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties so quickly). In his few free hours he favored Mickey Spillane novels and listening to baseball on the radio. His correspondence reveals a clear thinking pragmatist with a deep sense of responsibility to his society and to his profession. As James Davis writes in the introduction to Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (reprinted in 1992 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick), “Sam was a great sociologist….”
Read more about this topic: Samuel A. Stouffer
Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order, of union with God, the principle of all perfection.”
—Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
“The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)