"Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanat…"

"The social sciences are granted eternal youth because findings must be revisited."

"To have given clear and unified answers in familiar empirical terms to those theoretical questions which most occupie…"

"Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy."

"Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for exam…"

"Comte gave a powerful impetus to the development of sociology, an impetus which bore fruit in the later decades of th…"

"The year was 1968, and the fact that thirty-eight-year-old Levada called himself a sociologist, and his subject socio…"

"The critique of Parsons exploded sociological theory into a thousand glittering but laughably parochial fragments of …"

"Success in the sociologists' aim might lead, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, to "systems so perfect that no one would need t…"

"The Black student movement ... raised the questions: Why should we study classical sociological theory and be taught …"