Robert K. Merton Quotes

9 quotes in 225 categories

• Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
• Science is public, not private, knowledge.
• We thus begin to see that the institutionalized practice of citations and references in the sphere of learning is not a trivial matter. While many…
• The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.…
• Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.
• A cardinal American virtue, 'ambition,' promotes a cardinal American vice, 'deviant behavior.
• Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation…
• Only when he has published his ideas and findings has the scientist made his contribution, and only when he has thus made it part of…
• The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable.

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