Social Science Quotes

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.

Science of Society

The trouble with our intelligence is that we have a bunch of social scientists doing the analysis when the world is dominated by fanatics.

Economics is a subject that does not greatly respect one's wishes.

I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.

Economics has become as riveting as politics.

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychologyand sociology.

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry.

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.

I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn't understand both is a damned fool.

Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

Language is too complex for a computer to understand. It's not going to be able to make sense of what people are saying en masse. We need a new type of discipline that puts together computer scientists and social scientists, who can add context to the situation.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

I had always had a deep interest in social science, history. So even when I was in high school, I was debating, and in college debating, and interested in contemporary events.

Economics is not about things and tangible material objects; it is about men, their meanings and actions.

We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.

It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.