Quotes About Theory

The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.

Few scientists would treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes.

The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience.

Well,' said Hawksmoor. 'It's a theory and a theory can do no harm.

Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and "atypical" from exception to "rule" and "system," and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.

But everyone who can face up to decision making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behaviour rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

We cannot yet develop a theory of innovation. But we already know enough to say when, where, and how one looks systematically for innovative opportunities, and how one judges the chances for their success or the risks of their failure. We know enough to develop, though still only in outline form, the practice of innovation.

In recent years the tension between realism and empiricism has often been debated under the topic of the underdetermination of theory by evidence. Empiricists argue that there will always be a range of alternative theories compatible with all our actual evidence, and maybe a range of alternative theories compatible with all our possible evidence. So we never have good empirical grounds for choosing one of these theories over others and regarding it as representing how the world really is.

For van Fraassen, when a theory passes a lot of tests and becomes well established, the right attitude to have toward the theory is to accept it, in a special sense. To accept a theory is to (z) believe (provisionally) that the theory is empirically adequate, and to (z) use the concepts the theory provides when thinking about further problems and when trying to extend and refine the theory.

Primes are the atoms of the number system: every whole number is a product of primes.

Probably the best-known tenet of modern moral philosophy: the doctrine that there is an unbridgeable gulf between facts and values, between descriptions of what is and prescriptions of what ought to be.

In other words, theorists like van der Leeuw envision that a switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture creates a virtuous circle between problem-solving capacity and societal size, gradually leading to an increase of the scale of cooperation. I

Listen, I'm not an intellectual—Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces—of history.

The pot was unusual in one way, however. In it slumbered God. He slumbered in the pot for a long time, for almost too long. There is a theory among some religions that God intervenes at the eleventh hour. Maybe that is so; I couldn't say. In Horselover Fat's case God waited until three minutes before twelve, and even then what he did was barely enough: barely enough and virtually too late.

Darwin got it all wrong, you see. Fitness has nothing to do with it. It's survival of the sickest. That's all.

Così sosteneva Jerry, e così era andata. La teoria di Jerry è che lo Svedese è buono, cioè passivo, cioè uno che cerca sempre di fare le cose giuste: un carattere socialmente controllato che non esplode mai, non cede mai all'ira. Non avendo la rabbia al passivo, non l'ha neppure all'attivo. Secondo questa teoria , è la mancanza di rabbia che finisce per uccidere.

It is Jerry's theory that the Swede is nice, that is to say passive, that is to say trying always to do the right thing, a socially controlled character who doesn't burst out, doesn't yield to rage ever. Will not have the angry quality as his liability, so doesn't get it as an asset either. According to this theory, it's the no-rage that kills him in the end. Whereas aggression is cleansing or curing.

State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.

Marx inverted Hegel's dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.

In all the socialist literature I had read, there was hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth, the problem of getting people to work or to behave in a civilized manner. Socialist theory was exclusively addressed to the conquest of power and the division of wealth that someone else had created. Was it any surprise that socialist societies had broken world records in making their inhabitants poor?