A cardinal American virtue, 'ambition,' promotes a cardinal American vice, 'deviant behavior.

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

The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

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

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.

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