Quotes About Theory

Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they're correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of the graveyard.

I watch these specialists, each with a pet theory, each contorting the evidence to fit. I'm even less convinced by them now than I was back then; they still have nothing to teach me. None of their categorizations are fruitful in analyzing my performance, since—there's no point in denying it—I'm equally good at everything.

So much of mathematics had no practical application; it existed solely as a formal theory, studied for its intellectual beauty. But that couldn't last; a self-contradictory theory was so pointless that most mathematicians would drop it in disgust. What truly infuriated Renee was the way her own intuition had betrayed her. The damned theorem made sense; in its own perverted way, it felt right. She understood it, knew why it was true, believed it.

The appeal of the theory was easy for me to appreciate, though; I too had devoted many an hour to examining flakes of gold through a microscope and can imagine how gratifying it would be to turn the fine-adjustment knob and see legible symbols come into focus.

Occam's razor or the law of parsimony, which states that when two theories compete to explain an unknown phenomenon we should err on the side of the simpler explanation.

Among all the wild absurdities to which Mr. Thayer has committed himself, probably the wildest is his theory that flamingos are concealingly colored because their foes mistake them for sunsets . . . these suppositions represent nothing but pure guesswork, and even to call them guesswork is a little over-conservative, for they come nearer to the obscure mental processes which are responsible for dreams.

gender and power relations have been central to theoretical frameworks that attempt to understand prostitution

Action will remove the doubts that theory cannot solve.

A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.

Prior to the early 1960s, economic theorists rarely constructed models customized to capture unique institutions or specific market characteristics.

Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.

My siblings and I had this theory that my parents were spies.

The legal theory is, that marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband.

Quantum field theory, which was born just fifty years ago from the marriage of quantum mechanics with relativity, is a beautiful but not very robust child.

I have no useful theories about love and marriage.

Democracy, the deceitful theory that the Jew would insinuate - namely, that theory that all men are created equal.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.

Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed a single man and never overnight

It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.

If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.

He did not seem to grasp something that was clear enough to me and Cord: namely, that there were extras who would beat up avout simply because it was more entertaining than not beating them up—not because they subscribed to some ridiculous theory of what we were. He was assuming that rapscallions bothered to have theories.

Whether or not this was a valid theory, the fact was that Aïda swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and used it to inform her genetic strategy in the Great Game. And to the extent that the Four bothered to develop counterstrategies, they had to take it into account.

Gedankenexperiment