Quotes About Theory

My reading of serious books about serious music is seriously compromised by the way that I can't understand any musical theory. Any mentions of D major or C minor are meaningless to me.

Father Roger Boscovich is often credited as the father of modern atomic theory.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms in practice the freedom asserted by the laws in theory.

I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice.

Some years ago, in my syndicated column, I challenged anyone to name any economist, of any school of thought, who had actually advocated a "trickle down" theory. No one quoted any economist, politician or person in any other walk of life who had ever advocated such a theory, even though many readers named someone who claimed that someone else had advocated it, without being able to quote anything actually said by that someone else. 2

Put in different terms, profit is the price paid for efficiency. Clearly, the increase in efficiency must be greater than the profit, or else socialism would in practice have resulted in more affordable prices and greater prosperity, as its theorists hoped, but the latter never materialized in the real world.

Contrary to many theories of imperialism, this greatest of all empires did not revolve around an export of capital to the Third World.

Puesto en términos diferentes, el lucro es el precio que se paga por la eficiencia. Claramente, el incremento de la eficiencia debe ser mayor que el lucro, o de lo contrario el socialismo habría provocado, en la práctica, precios más asequibles y mayor prosperidad, como sus teóricos esperaban, pero esto último nunca se materializó en el mundo real.

But what are facts, really, except things we've already proven? There could be lots of almost-facts out there, still waiting for proof.

It's elementary chaos theory, or to give it its popular designation—Murphy's Law. Random changes happen all the time. Mistakes accumulate. Correcting them brings further changes. As someone smarter than me once said, evolution is smarter than you.

He'd written some of the movement's earliest manifestos ( No More Earthquakes , The Earth is a Harsh Mistress ) and numerous pamphlets, articles and books documenting what he called the counterconspiracy theory of history, which maintained that many otherwise incomprehensible historical events could be explained by identifying the conspiracy theories held by the protagonists.

The problem with our current societal eco-systems is the broken feedback loop between the parts and the whole. Theory U offers a method for relinking the parts and the whole by making it possible for the system to sense and see itself. When that happens, the collective consciousness begins to shift from ego-system awareness to eco-system awareness—from a silo view to a systems view.

I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they're learning the mechanics of the application of the theory.

Even a scientist is a human being. So it is natural for him, like others, to hate the things he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person's intellectual life.

No language exists that cannot be misused. It is hard to realize how badly we are fooled by the abuse of ideas; it even seems as if the unconscious had a way of strangling the physician in the coils of his own theory.

Na hranicích logiky sice kon?í vÄ›da, ne vÅ¡ak pÃ…â"¢íroda, která vzkvétá i tam, kam jeÅ¡tÄ› žádná teorie nepronikla.

The fact that many clergymen seek support or practical help from Freud's theory of sexuality or Adler's theory of power is astonishing, inasmuch as both these theories are hostile to spiritual values, being, as I have said, psychology without the psyche. They are rational methods of treatment which actually hinder the realization of meaningful experience.

Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

I know Edmond Locard's Principle, the central theory of modern forensic crime-scene investigation: something is always left behind.

reel. Everything about him seems drab—?his cotton work shirt, his complexion, his once-glistening eyes. He needs a haircut. Nathan has become his pillar of support. He checks on Bruce daily, invites him to dinner at least once a week. The rumors were rampant. Who had Samantha run away with? Every neighbor had a theory

This magician's trick of shifting the units of measure from money to time is the core novelty of what the philosopher Frédéric Gros calls Thoreau's "new economics," a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

In this second part, I introduce a framework I call attention capital theory that argues for creating workflows built around processes specifically designed to help us get the most out of our human brains while minimizing unnecessary miseries. This