The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. Bertrand Russell
Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.
W H Auden
The prime lesson the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences is just this: that it is necessary to press on to find the positive conditions under which desired events take place, and that these can be just as scientifically investigated as can instances of negative correlation. Ruth Benedict
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the ‘social sciences’ is: some do, some don’t. Lord Ernest Rutherford
The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the ‘hard’ sciences so brilliantly successful. Herbert Simon