Theory Quotes - Page 18

• Art has the lovely habit of ruining all artistic theories.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Lovely, Habit

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• If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.

  Mao Zedong

  Chinese Revolution, Want, Method

  1937 Address to the Anti- Japanese Military and Political College, Jul.

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• Theory is worth but little, unless it can explain its own phenomena, and it must effect this without contradicting itself; therefore, the facts are sometimes assimilated to the theory, rather than the theory to the facts.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Littles, Facts, Sometimes

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.69

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• Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.

  Edith Hamilton

  Nature, Literature, Facts

  The Roman Way Comedy's Mirror

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• Theories are usually the over-hasty efforts of an impatient understanding that would gladly be rid of phenomena, and so puts in their place pictures, notions, nay, often mere words.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Effort, Understanding, Impatient

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.174, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• It takes enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see.

  Michael Crichton

  Effort, Enormous

  Michael Crichton (2012). “Travels”, p.509, Vintage

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• Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.

  Karl Popper

  Science, Technology, Alive

  "My Universe: A Transcendent Reality". Book by Alex Vary, Part II, 2011.

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• All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Wisdom, Political, Ignorant

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek. Part I: "The Value of Freedom". Chapter 2: "The Creative Power of a Free Civilization", 1960.

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• Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Rights, Differences

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• Christianity is not a political theory. It is not even a cultural theory. It is, at its root, all about changing the heart of each man and woman, boy and girl, so that we begin to think God's thoughts and act in accordance with his character.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Girl, Heart, Character

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• When you're operating on uninvestigated theories of what's going on and you aren't even aware of it, you're in what I call "the dream." Often the dream becomes troubling; sometimes it even turns into a nightmare. At times like these, you may want to test the truth of your theories by doing The Work on them. The Work always leaves you with less of your uncomfortable story. Who would you be without it? How much of your world is made up of unexamined stories? You'll never know until you inquire.

  Byron Katie

  Dream, Times Like These, Stories

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• [T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Book, Competition, Liberty

  "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money". Book by John Maynard Keynes, Preface to the German Edition, February, 1936.

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• Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Practice, Liberty, Libertarian

  William Lloyd Garrison, Bruce Rogers (1905). “The Words of Garrison: A Centennial Selection (1805-1905) of Characteristic Sentiments from the Writings of William Lloyd Garrison”

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• In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. - Manifesto of the Communist Party

  Karl Marx

  Party, Liberty, May

  Karl Marx (2015). “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, p.18, Booklassic

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• Even mistaken hypotheses and theories are of use in leading to discoveries. This remark is true in all the sciences. The alchemists founded chemistry by pursuing chimerical problems and theories which are false. In physical science, which is more advanced than biology, we might still cite men of science who make great discoveries by relying on false theories.

  Claude Bernard

  Mistake, Science, Men

  "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine".

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• For chemistry is no science form'd à priori; 'tis no production of the human mind, framed by reasoning and deduction: it took its rise from a number of experiments casually made, without any expectation of what follow'd; and was only reduced into an art or system, by collecting and comparing the effects of such unpremeditated experiments, and observing the uniform tendency thereof. So far, then, as a number of experimenters agree to establish any undoubted truth; so far they may be consider'd as constituting the theory of chemistry.

  Herman Boerhaave

  Art, Science, Numbers

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• The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Volcanoes, Sight

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.280, Harvard University Press

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• Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.

  Thomas Kuhn

  Science, Environmental, Progress

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• The theory of the method of knowing which is advanced in these pages may be termed pragmatic. ... Only that which has been organized into our disposition so as to enable us to adapt the environment to our needs and adapt our aims and desires to the situation in which we live is really knowledge.

  John Dewey

  Knowledge, Science, Knowing

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.313, Courier Corporation

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• Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not bring us any closer to the secrets of the "Old One." I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.

  Albert Einstein

  God, Real, Voice

  Quoted in Ronald W. Clark's Einstein: The Life and Times (p. 340)

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• The most practical solution is a good theory.

  Albert Einstein

  Science, Practicals, Solutions

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• A sound Physics of the Earth should include all the primary considerations of the earth's atmosphere, of the characteristics and continual changes of the earth's external crust, and finally of the origin and development of living organisms. These considerations naturally divide the physics of the earth into three essential parts, the first being a theory of the atmosphere, or Meteorology, the second, a theory of the earth's external crust, or Hydrogeology, and the third, a theory of living organisms, or Biology.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Science, Atmosphere, Sound

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• In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence. The mind's activity that is maintained by the debates about these works, is probably the source of the greatest joys given to man to experience on Earth.

  Louis Agassiz

  Science, Men, Order

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• It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost certainty, that our earth has not always been covered over by the same external crust, because we are thoroughly assured that the organized bodies to which these fossil remains belong must have lived upon the surface before they came to be buried, as they now are, at a great depth.

  Georges Cuvier

  Science, Depth, Body

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• There is no foundation in geological facts, for the popular theory of the successive development of the animal and vegetable world, from the simplest to the most perfect forms.

  Charles Lyell

  Science, Animal, Vegetables

  Sir Charles Lyell, Gérard Paul Deshayes (1830). “Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation”, p.153

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