sociology quotes

To customs and beliefs, the very ones we hold sacred, sociology ruthlesslyattaches the adjective 'arbitrary'.

- Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron
Politics and History.

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

- SirAlfred Jules Ayer
  Language, Truth and Logic, ch.6.

What is it about sociology that instantly bogsus down in fens of jargon?

- Russell Wayne Baker
  In the NewYork Times,15 Dec.

Economics is all about how people make choices. Sociology isall about why theydon't haveanychoicesto make.

-James Stemble Duesenberry
  In the National Bureau of Economic Research's Demographic and Economic Change in the Developed World.

Sociology is a new science concerning itself not with esoteric matters outside the comprehension of the layman, as the older sciences do, but with the ordinary affairs of ordinary people. This seems to engender in those who write about it a feeling that the lack of anyabstruseness in their subject matter demands a compensatoryabstruseness in their language. 365

- Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers
  'Sociologese', in H F Fowler A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2nd rev edn).

Sociology isthescience of talk, and there is onlyone law in sociology. Bad talk drives out good.

- Frank Hyneman Knight
Quoted in Paul  A Samuelson The Samuelson Sampler (1973).

With all allowance made for Marx's erudition and his historic impact upon the social sciences, especially sociology, it is as an art united with prophecy, virtually religious prophecy, that Marxism survives.

- Robert Nisbet
  Sociology as an  Art Form, ch.5.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

- AlbionW Small
  An Introduction to the Study of Society (with George E Vincent,1894).

Sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century.

- Pierre L van den Berghe
'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed) Authors of their Own Lives (1990).