Quotes About Theory

Sherlock Holmes: the Arthur Conan Doyle character who declared, "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

I have a theory because I was being beaten up a lot by people outside of school, it was almost like if I could make myself sick enough they'd take sympathy on me.

I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing.

The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

Science would like to tell us that people laugh because of the benign violation theory, but comedy doesn't have hard rules.

A tactic used by authors of virtually every single book I've ever read that propounds a conspiracy theory is to attack an agency as being part of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, but when this same agency comes up with something favorable to the author's position, the author will cite that same agency as credible support for his argument.

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.

Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle.

To establish a bridge of attunement, we rely on many neural systems that receive and send social and emotional information. We use all of this information to create theories about what is on the minds of others.

Darwin's ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them.

The disjoining of deed from will, of practice from theory, is to put asunder what God has joined by an indissoluble sacrament. The soul must be tainted before the action become corrupt; and there is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual.

To me it seems not unreasonable to find a re-enforcement of optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the modern theory that man has mounted to what he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through toilsome grades of ever-expanding existence, even though it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided view.

Everyone who becomes a psychotherapist eventually adopts a theory that suits his needs.

that pure science searches for the truth without worrying about its practical application,

Uma das principais extravagâncias do período contemporâneo é reduzir a filosofia a uma simples "reflexão crítica" ou ainda a uma "teoria da argumentação".

les trois Critiques qui correspondent, en première approximation à la théorie de la connaissance, à la morale et à l'esthétique.

The father of information theory, Claude Shannon (1916–2001),

Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party and in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories.

every type of socialism is unworkable because economic calculation is impossible in a socialist community.

Under certain conditions, index numbers may do very useful service as an aid to investigation into the history and statistics of prices; for the extension of the theory of the nature and value of money they are unfortunately not very important.

No individual and no nation need fear at any time to have less money than it needs. Government measures designed to regulate the international movement of money in order to ensure that the community shall have the amount it needs, are just as unnecessary and inappropriate as, say, intervention to ensure a sufficiency or corn or iron or the like. This argument dealt the Mercantilist Theory its death-blow.

The balance-of-payments theory forgets that the volume of foreign trade is completely dependent upon prices; that neither exportation nor importation can occur if there are no differences in prices to make trade profitable.