Theory Quotes - Page 10

• The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Boys, Thinking, Years

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• This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

  John Steinbeck

  Religious, Philosophy, School

  John Steinbeck (2016). “The Grapes of Wrath”, p.119, Hamilton Books

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• There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Believe, Eye, Pyramids

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• Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Men, Mustache, Suffering

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• Theory is the practice of the impotent.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Practice

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• The whole point of the Eugenic pseudo-scientific theories is that they are to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing money power than the individual husband or wife or household. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Clever, Husband, Stupid

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• I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

  David Foster Wallace

  Philosophy, Use, Four

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• I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.

  Sam Harris

  Ted Bundy, Strings, String Theory

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• Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone. What happened in their first five minutes? Time stopped.

  Laura Dave

  Filled In, Long, Details

  Laura Dave (2007). “London Is the Best City in America”, p.56, Penguin

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• No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while." "So you don't really have a theory?" "Clueless." "You lying bag of fish heads." "I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?" "I'm not getting paid." "See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact.

  Christopher Moore

  Lying, Clueless, Fire

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• The universe is big, its vast and complicated, and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles. And that's the theory. Nine hundred years, never seen one yet, but this would do me.

  Steven Moffat

  Impossible Things, Years, Miracle

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• During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Lying, Class, Names

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• Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk. They had somehow got it into their heads that each fairy lugged around a pot of gold with him wherever he went. While it was true that LEP had a ransom fund, because of its officers' high-risk occupation, no human had ever taken a chunk of it yet. This didn't stop the Irish population in general from skulking around rainbows, hoping to win the supernatural lottery.

  Eoin Colfer

  Crazy, Taken, Winning

  Eoin Colfer (2001). “Artemis Fowl”

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• I knew right then you were the only one for me." He pulled her hand from his face, kissed her palm, then pressed it flat against his chest. "Beatings, battles, fights. No matter how bleak the circumstance, no matter how my soul despaired ... this heart never once gave up." His voice deepened, went thick with emotion. "I've a theory as to why. Do you want to hear it?" She nodded. "This heart is yours. It's yours," he said. "It always will be.

  Tessa Dare

  Heart, Fighting, Hands

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• Nobility and self-sacrifice sound wonderful in theory, but now he’s seen how it feels. A dead hero is still dead at the end of the day, and you’re still alone.

  Ann Aguirre

  Hero, Sacrifice, Self

  Ann Aguirre (2010). “Killbox”, p.30, Penguin

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• I wanted to kick Bruce in the taint. No one is just one thing. Many things contribute to the whole of a person, and just because vodka accounts for 50 percent of my body weight, that doesn't mean I walk around with a vodka drip, forcing every plant, person, or animal to imbibe. I've always had a disliking for animal trainers, and this guy cemented my theory that people who chaperone animals for a living have never had a girl sit on their face.

  Chelsea Handler

  Girl, Mean, Animal

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• The physics are simple in theory, but in practice they are filled with the possibility for limitless error.

  Christopher Pike

  Simple, Errors, Practice

  Christopher Pike (2013). “Thirst: Thirst No. 1; Thirst No. 2; Thirst”, p.129, Simon and Schuster

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• You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. "Theories of Time and Space

  Natasha Trethewey

  Home, Space, Going Home

  Natasha Trethewey (2007). “Native Guard”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.

  Steven Pinker

  Mother, Sleep, Boys

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.460, W. W. Norton & Company

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• When the fact doesn't meet the theory then let go the theory.

  Agatha Christie

  Letting Go, Facts

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• Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

  R. D. Laing

  Needs, Fiction, Adequate

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody's time.

  Jeannette Walls

  Dad, Space, Purpose

  Jeannette Walls (2009). “Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel”, p.24, Simon and Schuster

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• All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Atheist, Thinking, Hair

  H. P. Lovecraft (1999). “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories”, p.11, Penguin

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• It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee.

  Steig Larsson

  Stupid, Security Systems, Employee

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• It might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs" - (L.T.'s Theory of Pets)

  Stephen King

  Dog, Cat, Men

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