The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable.

The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable.

Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

Only when he has published his ideas and findings has the scientist made his contribution, and only when he has thus made it part of the public domain of scholarship can he truly lay claim to it as his own. For his claim resides only in the recognition accorded by peers in the social system of science through reference to his work.

Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.

Science is public, not private, knowledge.

Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.