Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Greeley

Greeley smuggles a methodological provocation into a plainspoken, almost pastoral line: you cannot talk about people without, in some sense, counting them. By stretching "survey" beyond clipboards and Gallup, he punctures the smug hierarchy that treats statistical research as coldly empirical and everyday moral judgment as warmly intuitive. His intent is leveling. The armchair theorist, the preacher, the pundit, the parent lecturing a teenager - all are sampling experience, generalizing from what they have seen, and presenting it as knowledge.

The subtext is a warning about unacknowledged authority. If everyone is already doing surveys, then the real question becomes: how sloppy is yours, and how much power are you claiming for it? Greeley, a clergyman who moved comfortably between parish life and social science, is implicitly challenging communities of faith (and the broader culture) that speak confidently about "human nature" while refusing the discipline of checking their assumptions against reality. It's a quiet rebuke to moral certainty that never meets data.

Context matters: late-20th-century America was awash in polling, marketing research, and culture-war pronouncements about family, sex, crime, and religion. Greeley positions surveys not as a technocratic intrusion but as an honest admission of how belief gets formed. The line works because it reframes social science as humility: an attempt to make our inevitable generalizations visible, testable, and therefore less dangerous.