There are no better terms available to describe [the] difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than ...to call the former "objective" and the latter "subjective."... While for the natural scientist the contrast between objective facts and subjective opinions is a simple one, the distinction cannot as readily be applied to the object of the social sciences. The reason for this is that the object, the "facts" of the social sciences are also opinions--not opinions of the student of the social phenomena, of course, but opinions of those whose actions produce the object of the social scientist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now, it may be stretching an analogy to compare epidemics of cholera--caused by a known agent--with that epidemic of violent crime... which is destroying our cities. It is unlikely that our social problems can be traced to a single, clearly defined cause in the sense that a bacterial disease is "caused" by a microbe. But, I daresay, social science is about as advanced in the late twentieth century as bacteriological science was in the mid nineteenth century. Our forerunners knew something about cholera; they sensed that its spread was associated with misdirected sewage, filth, and the influx of alien poor into crowded, urban tenements. And we know something about street crime; nowhere has it been reported that a member of the New York Stock Exchange has robbed a poor, black teenager at the point of a gun. Indeed, I am naively confident that an enlightened social scientist of the next century will be able to point out that we had available to us at least some of the clues to the cause of urban crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoveri...shment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Freud's] views are remarkably similar to those of the great theorist of autocracy, Thomas Hobbes; for he, too, tried to build a s...ocial order on a psychology--and one emphasizing men's fears and passions. Just as Freud imagined that society began from a compact of the brothers who had slain their tyrant father and realized that only in union and renunciation could they avoid the war of all against all, so Hobbes saw men in the state of nature as engaged in ceaseless combat, with peace attainable only by renunciation of virtually all individual rights.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination....... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the ...old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than to submit to... the desolation of an empty abundance. It is a strange part of the other America that one finds in the intellectual slums.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We cannot think of a legitimate argument why ... whites and blacks need be affected by the knowledge that an aggregate difference ...in measured intelligence is genetic instead of environmental.... Given a chance, each clan ... will encounter the world with confidence in its own worth and, most importantly, will be unconcerned about comparing its accomplishments line-by-line with those of any other clan. This is wise ethnocentricism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »