Method Quotes - Page 33

• But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

  Matthew Arnold

  Sweet, Jesus, Secret

  'Literature and Dogma' (1873) ch. 12

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• Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

  Niels Bohr

  Independent, Judgement, Development

  Niels Bohr, Leon Rosenfeld (1999). “Collected works”

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• The abhorrence of society to the use of involuntary confessions does not turn alone on their inherent untrustworthiness. It also turns on the deep-rooted feeling that the police must obey the law while enforcing the law; that, in the end, life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.

  Earl Warren

  Law, Police, Feelings

  Writing for the court, Spano v. New York 360 U.S. 321, 1959.

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• The inquiry into Nature having thus been pursued nearly two thousand years theologically, we find by the middle of the sixteenth century some promising beginnings of a different method the method of inquiry into Nature scientifically the method which seeks not plausibilities but facts.

  Andrew Dickson White

  Years, Two, Different

  Andrew Dickson White (2012). “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom: From Creation to the Victory of Scientific and Literary Methods”, p.40, Transaction Publishers

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• The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.

  James G. Frazer

  Inspire, Cheerful, Splendor

  "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion". Book by James G. Frazer, 1890.

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• A spurious democracy has influenced both our research methods (I am sometimes tempted to define "validity" as part of the context of an experiment demanding so little in the way of esoteric gift that any number can play at it, provided they have taken a certain number of courses) and our research subjects (it would be deemed snobbish to investigate only the best people).

  David Riesman

  Taken, Play, Numbers

  David Riesman (1955). “Selected essays from Individualism reconsidered”

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• The bureaucratic method of building an integrated Europe has exhausted its potential.

  George Soros

  Europe, Exhausted, Building

  "Can Europe Work? A Plan to Rescue the Union". Foreign Affairs, September/October 1996.

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• The goal is justice, the method? is transparency. It's important not to confuse the goal and the method.

  Julian Assange

  Justice, Goal, Important

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• The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

  Theodor Adorno

  Surveillance, Authority, Undisciplined

  "Wozu noch Philosophie? (Why still philosophy?)". Paper by Theodor Adorno, 1963.

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• I shall add that only he who has decided to commit suicide can start a nuclear war in the hope of emerging a victor from it. No matter what the attacker might possess, no matter what method of unleashing nuclear war he chooses, he will not attain his aims. Retribution will inevitably ensue.

  Leonid Brezhnev

  Suicide, War, Add

  "Soviet Strategy and the New Military Thinking". Book by Derek Leebaert and Timothy Dickinson, p. 68, 1992.

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• I now say that the world has the technology - either available or well advanced in the research pipeline - to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called "organic" methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.

  Norman Borlaug

  Technology, Pertinent Questions, People

  Norman Borlaug's 30th anniversary lecture at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo (September 8, 2000), as quoted in Ronald Bailey "Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death" (p. 59), 2002.

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• How rare it is to come across a piece of writing that is unambiguous, unqualified, and also unblurred by understatements or subtleties, and yet at the same time urbane and tolerant. It is a vice of the scientific method when applied to human affairs that it fosters hemming and hawing and a scrupulousness that easily degenerates into obscurity and meaninglessness.

  Eric Hoffer

  Writing, Vices, Obscurity

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.

  William James

  Moving, Risk, Trying

  William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.325, Library of America

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• Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.

  Russell Baker

  Men, Goal, Inanimate Objects

  "The Plot Against People," The New York Times, June 18, 1968.

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• I firmly believe that the method which sets theological theories against scientifically ascertained facts, is fatal to the current theology and injurious to the spirit of religion; and that the method which frankly recognizes the facts of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scientists whose patient and assiduous endeavor has brought those facts to light, will commend the spirit of religion to the new generation, and will benefit--not impair--theology as a science, by compelling its reconstruction.

  Lyman Abbott

  Believe, Light, Appreciate

  Lyman Abbott (2009). “The Theology of an Evolutionist”, p.37, Cambridge University Press

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• Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication--but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

  Isaac Asimov

  Communication, Men, Mind

  Isaac Asimov (1986). “Foundation Trilogy”, Del Rey

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• The Tyranni rule fifty worlds; they are outnumbered hundreds to one. In such a position, simple force is insufficient. Devious methods, intrigue, assassination are their specialties. The net they weave across space is a wide one, and close-meshed. I can well believe that it extends across five hundred light-years to Earth.

  Isaac Asimov

  Believe, Simple, Space

  Isaac Asimov (2008). “The Stars, Like Dust”, p.28, Tor Books

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• The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Spiritual, Discovery, Effort

  Sri Aurobindo (2006). “The Upanishads--II : Kena And Other Upanishads”, p.355, SriAurobindoAshram Publication Dept

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• I say, of the Congress, then, this - that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders; - in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Men, Leader, Spirit

  "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), August 28, 1893.

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• There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Way, Social, Analysts

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• There are two ways of doing battle against Disgrace. You may live it down; or you may run away from it and hide. The first method is heart-breaking, but sure. The second cannot be relied upon because of the uncomfortable way Disgrace has of turning up at your heels.

  Edna Ferber

  Running, Heart, Two

  Edna Ferber (2015). “Buttered Side Down”, p.12, Booklassic

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• The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented and with a mature sense of the sacred in Buddhism and Hinduism.

  Camille Paglia

  Buddhism, Followers, Pieces

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.211, Vintage

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• When a soul has advanced so far on the spiritual road as to be lost to all the natural methods of communing with God; when it seeks Him no longer by meditation, images, impressions, nor by any other created ways, or representations of sense, but only by rising above them all, in the joyful communion with Him by faith and love, then it may be said to have found God of a truth, because it has truly lost itself as to all that is not God, and also as to its own self.

  John of the Cross

  Spiritual, Self, Meditation

  "Cántico Espiritual (The Spiritual Canticle)". Book by John of the Cross (Note to Stanza 29, Part 8), 1622.

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• One [method] is by a Watch to keep time exactly. But, by reason of the motion of the Ship, the Variation of Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the Difference of Gravity in different Latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made.

  Isaac Newton

  Differences, Different, Watches

  David Brewster, Isaac Newton (1855). “Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton”, p.260

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• Through algebra you easily arrive at equations, but always to pass therefrom to the elegant constructions and demonstrations which usually result by means of the method of porisms is not so easy, nor is one's ingenuity and power of invention so greatly exercised and refined in this analysis.

  Isaac Newton

  Mean, Analysis, Construction

  Isaac Newton (2008). “1691-1695”, p.261, Cambridge University Press

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