Thou shall not sin With statisticians nor commit A social science.

-Auden,W(ystan) H(ugh)
'Under  Which Lyre'.

We know very little about what it is that moves great masses of men to action, and until we know more about this it is fitting for the social scientist to maintain a becoming modesty in the presence of a great deal to be modest about.

-Boulding, Kenneth Ewart
  The Impact of the Social Sciences.

There's more hateful form of fooleryö The social sage's, Solomon of saloons And philosophic diner-out.

-Browning, Robert
  Dramatis Personae,'Mr Sludge, The Medium', stanza1.

Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mum stays home and looks after the children. But that person is dadöa finding of limited use to backlash publicists.

-Faludi, Susan
  Backlash (UK edn), ch.2,'Man Shortages and Barren Wombs'.

Science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information.

-Gould, StephenJay
The Mismeasure of Man.

Ifthere istechnological advancewithout social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.

-Harrington, Michael
  The Other America: Poverty in the United States, ch.1.

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

-Hobsbawm, Eric (John Ernest)
  In the NewYork Review of Books,18 Nov.

The social progress, order, security and peace of each countryare necessarily connected with the social progress, order, securityand peace of all other countries.

-PopeJohn XXIII originally Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli
  Pacem in Terris,10  Apr.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Manö There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:ö That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

-Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard
  Rudyard Kipling's Verse,'The Gods of the Copybook Headings'.

No tin hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibblebabbling mob of blackguarding and corporation- paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor, ordivert its purposetoplay itsnatural and rational part in the development of the economic, political, and social life of our nation.

-Lewis,John L(lewellyn)
   Address, 3 Sep. Recalled on his death11  Jun1969.

Better a'e gowden lyric Than a social problem solved.

-Grieve
  To Circumjack Cencrastus, or The Curly Snake.

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

-McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall
  Understanding Media, ch.33.

Even the categories inwhich experiences are subsumed, collected, and ordered varyaccording to the social position of the observer.

-Mannheim, Karl
  Ideology and Utopia.

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. The purpose shall be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

-Marshall, George C(atlett)
  Speech at Harvard, 5  Jun, announcing the European Recovery Plan (ER A) that became known as the Marshall Plan.

   Assume a particular state of development in the productive facilities of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil societyand you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
  Letter to P  V Annenkov, 26 Dec.

   If capital isgrowing rapidly, wages may rise; the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened.

-Marx, Karl Heinrich
  'Wage Labour and Capital', collected in Robert C  Tucker (ed)  The Marx^Engels Reader (2nd edn,1972), p.211.

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

-Mill,John Stuart
 Principles of Political Economy, with Some Applications to Social Philosophy.

No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.

-Mills, C(harles) Wright
  The Sociological Imagination, ch.1.

Social life ismutual negotiation and society, social order, relies on this mutual negotiation between individuals; this represents both creed and particular reality in American society. In no other society is this creed and the corresponding reality as prominent as the United States.

-Mu«  nch, Richard Friedrich
  'The  American Creed in Sociological Theory', in Sociological Theory, vol.4, issue 43.

Countless works in the social sciences reveal the inability of their authors to bear in mind the crucial difference between what may properly be called the logic of discovery and the logic of demonstration. The second isproperlysubjectto rules and prescriptions; the first isn't.

-Nisbet, Robert
  Sociology as an  Art Form, introduction.