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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.

It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.

The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

I've always been torn between the pure and the social sciences.

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods.

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

In the snobbery of science, each branch attempts to rise in the social scale by imitating the methods of the next higher science and by ignoring the methods and phenomena of the sciences beneath.

Science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind. Because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe.

Historically, science and society have gone separate ways, although society has provided the funds for science to grow, and in return, science has given society all the material things it enjoys.