Best Social Science Quotes

#1. Both [social science & science fiction] attempt to understand empirical facts and lived experience as something that is shaped by abstract - and not directly perceptible - structural forces.

Peter Frase

#2. Both doubt and certainty are as contagious as the common cold

Kathryn Schulz

#3. The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

Larry Niven

#4. Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

Jim Stanford

#5. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"

Robert Kuttner

#6. Writing is a master craft in the finest art,
the loneliest profession in the most social science,
the most influential medium in the toughest industry,
yet is the most under-rated profession.

Grant McLachlan

#7. My folks are economists and have taught economics and social science so I grew up with those kind of conversations around the dinner table.

Seth Gordon

#8. Neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power

John Money

#9. No real social change has ever been
brought about without a revolution -
Revolution is but thought carried into action.
Every effort for progress, for enlightenment,
for science, for religious, political, and
economic liberty, emanates from the minority,
and not from the mass.

Emma Goldman

#10. We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

Jared Diamond

#11. What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

Doris Lessing

#12. Social Science ... led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.

David Riesman

#13. Leaders are not modest, and more importantly, the extensive social science research on narcissism, self-promotion, and similar constructs shows that these qualities and behaviors are useful for getting hired, achieving promotions, keeping one's job, and obtaining a higher salary.

Jeffrey Pfeffer

#14. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know.

Isaac Asimov

#15. As the world of science has grown in size and in power, its deepest problems have changed from the epistemological to the social.

Jerome Ravetz

#16. A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn't healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one's own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.

Clyde Tombaugh

#17. Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times.

Stephen Jay Gould

#18. Having lasted for 4,000 years, the use of nature's materials to express ideas about nature may be expected to continue. The best garden designs are produced with an awareness of the art, science, history, geography, philosophy, social habits and construction techniques of their period.

Tom Turner

#19. At their best, at their most creative, science and engineering are attributes of liberty-noble expressions of man's God-given right to investigate and explore the universe without fear of social or political or religious reprisals.

David Sarnoff

#20. From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.

Donna J. Haraway

#21. Bookworms aren't people who love to read. They are people who treat books as treasures. Anonymous

Bette A. Stevens

#22. A President must call on many persons
some to man the ramparts and to watch the far away, distant posts; others to lead us in science, medicine, education and social progress here at home.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#23. The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.

Leslie White

#24. Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man

Bertrand Russell

#25. Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

Paul Di Filippo

#26. The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit requires a freedom that consists in the independence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudice.

Albert Einstein

#27. As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities.

Edwin Land

#28. Many years have passed since I first discovered you. You troubled me then. You trouble me now. But mortality, like thunder, rumbles its dull way toward me. It is I who must take the step. Through the fire. And come unto you.

Caryl Phillips

#29. Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'

Temple Grandin

#30. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.

Irvine Welsh

#31. I believe that it is the task of social science to produce nuanced and people-centered forms of knowledge, correcting asymmetries of information and helping to promote, to the best of our ability, informed consent, human protection, and safety in medical and research settings.

Adriana Petryna

#32. In the snobbery of science, each branch attempts to rise in the social scale by imitating the methods of the next higher science and by ignoring the methods and phenomena of the sciences beneath.

Gilbert Newton Lewis

#33. Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

George Lucas

#34. This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

Sheila Jeffreys

#35. The development of science is basically a social phenomenon, dependent on hard work and mutual support of many scientists and on the societies in which they live.

Charles H. Townes

#36. Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.

Edgar Douglas Adrian

#37. There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#38. The once-science-fiction notion of hyper-connectivity - where we are all constantly connected to social networks and other bubbling streams of digital data - has rapidly become a widespread reality.

Geoff Mulgan

#39. This is the legacy of a compassionate bunch. Our fate now rests on the whims of men.

Leot Felton

#40. In Our Underachieving Colleges, [Derek] Bok acts as both diagnostician and healer, wielding social-science statistics and professional studies to trace the etiology of today's illnesses and to recommend palliative treatments for what he has discovered.

Donald Kagan