No man knows fully what has shaped his own thinking - Robert K. Merton

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

[Merton states that anomie represents] An acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them.

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.