Tom Wolfe Quotes

It's not rocket science. It's social science.

Science of Society

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

I am a sociologist, God help me.

My students often ask me, 'What is sociology?' And I tell them, 'It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see.'

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

I love to study people, and that's basically what sociology is.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline - sociology - as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals.

It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.

Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

I would have liked to have been a professor of sociology.

I admit that the eyes of the intellectually and culturally lively tend to glaze over at the mere mention of sociology, often with ample justification.

Social science has been established not to set policy but to measure its results.

I don't want to become a serious, annoying sociologist. I try to regard sociology as a part of everyday life.

I come from a specific tradition of sociology, which is urban ethnography.

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.

If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

Bill Phillips was this nervous, chain-smoking student. He had signed up to be an engineer, he had gone away to fight in the Second World War, he had come back. He had switched to sociology because he wanted to understand how people could do these terrible things to each other. And he did a little bit of economics on the side.

If it's far away, it's news, but if it's close at home, it's sociology.