"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."
"However, temporalized elements (events, actions) always have an element of surprise about them; they are always new combinations of certainty and uncertainty. This rules out a scientific program that aims to explain the concrete. [...] The key question is then no longer: how did this or that concrete state come about? Rather, it must be: how is abstraction possible? [...] When scientific theory has to deal with theories of this kind, it can no longer act as a legislator. It can see itself as a differentiator. In this sense, we defined the concept of the paradigm as a guiding difference in the introduction. Theory of science is itself only theory if it understands its necessity as the necessity of reproducing knowledge experiences and if it sees its task as drafting the abstractions necessary for this. The title “theory” also, but not only, implies a willingness to revise. It also signals a combinatorial increase in chance and necessity."