53 Quotes About Social-science

I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.

...first, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called "simultancous" distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning

Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.

Parsons famously divided the social science world into a set of component "systems"—notably the social, the cultural, and the psychological—a division that by now seems as arbitrary as it was then influential, especially in its distinction between social structure and the cultural order. Even at the time, it struck some that the project was like analyzing water into its discernible ele­ments of hydrogen and oxygen in order to understand why it runs downhill.

My conception stands opposed to social science as a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by ‘methodolocigal’ pretentions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.

Once the nations can genuinely engage in interventions of international unity, national security will prevail on its own.

History is naughty for it first creates chaos and then brings about order.

Biology teaches us that we’re competitive social animals, with all the instincts you’d expect from such creatures. And consciousness is useful—that’s why it evolved. So shouldn’t it stand to reason that we’d be hyper-conscious of our deepest biological incentives? And yet, most of the time, we seem almost willfully unaware of them. We all know they’re there. And yet they make us uncomfortable, so we mentally flinch away.

El juego político es un asunto de profesionales para impulsar, sobre todo entre la gente menos politizada, un desapego fatalista, favorable, evidentemente, al mantenimiento del orden establecido.