"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall."
"First, the list of most-frequently cited authors in sociology is, unfortunately, very white, very male, and fairly dead."
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
"It is true that my interest in the foundations of mathematics was aroused by the Vienna Circle, but the philosophical consequences of my results, as well as the heuristic principles leading to them, are anything but positivistic or empiristic. [...] I was a conceptual and mathematical realist since about 1925."
“Sociology is the science with the greatest number of methods and the least results.”
"There are no bad ideas, just bad theories"
"A student who has difficulty thinking of at least three sensible explanations for any correlation that he is really interested in should probably choose another profession."
"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
"[Empiricism and statistics] looks, if you look at it from the outside, like the production of a self-constructed certainty, like the production of a construction. If one analyzes it epistemologically, one would perhaps guess at an operative constructivism. On the other hand, empirical sociologists cannot forget to point out that their measurements are reality, so that reality is actually always behind the data. But you can't reach it directly either, otherwise you would duplicate what is already there, instead you want to use technologies to find out more about reality. But that's approaching from behind, from an unexplored reality."