Robert K. Merton Quotes

• A cardinal American virtue, 'ambition,' promotes a cardinal American vice, 'deviant behavior.

  Robert K. Merton

  Ambition, Vices, Virtue

  Robert K. Merton, Piotr Sztompka (1996). “On Social Structure and Science”, p.143, University of Chicago Press

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• Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

  Robert K. Merton

  Inspirational, Faith, Science

  Robert K. Merton (1973). “The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations”, p.265, University of Chicago Press

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• 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. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

  Robert K. Merton

  Science, Errors, Self

  "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" (1948)

  37 Copy quote

• Science is public, not private, knowledge.

  Robert K. Merton

  Knowledge, Science, Accounts

  37 Copy quote

• The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable.

  Robert K. Merton

  Running, Risk, Mind

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• Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.

  Robert K. Merton

  Years, Ideas, Stealing

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• 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 public domain of scholarship can he truly lay claim to it as his own. For his claim resides only in the recognition accorded by peers in the social system of science through reference to his work.

  Robert K. Merton

  Science, Ideas, Peers

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• 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 a general reader-that is, the lay reader located outside the domain of science and scholarship-may regard the lowly footnote or the remote endnote or the bibliographic parenthesis as a dispensable nuisance, it can be argued that these are in truth central to the incentive system and an underlying sense of distributive justice that do much to energize the advancement of knowledge.

  Robert K. Merton

  Learning, Knowledge, Science

  Robert K. Merton, Piotr Sztompka (1996). “On Social Structure and Science”, p.333, University of Chicago Press

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• 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 for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.

  Robert K. Merton

  Views, Order, Temptation

  20 Copy quote

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