Quotes About Theory

Historically, the notes of scale systems anywhere have been based on these pure harmonics.

Theoretically in Germany there is more space because it is less tactical.

Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.

I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

Jerry Fodor, a fierce critic of pragmatist approaches to mind and language, puts this sort of criticism in a nutshell when he says: "First the pragmatist theory of concepts, then the theory theory of concepts, then holism, then relativism. So it goes" (Fodor 1994, p. 111).

A statement that mathematicians believe but cannot as yet prove is called a "conjecture".

But these days, I'm working on the theory that killing everyone I don't like might be counterproductive.

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Life turned out to be very different from theory. But they would not admit they were wrong: whenever things did not turn out as desired, they did not compromise but instead intensified the violence. To admit to being wrong would threaten to unravel the whole theoretical foundation of their regime, since it claimed to be scientifically correct in all its parts.

The theory and practice of socialism, and its offshoot, communism, postulate that all the existing ways of humanity are irrational and that it is the mission of those in the know to make out of them something radically different: mankind's entire past is but a long detour on the road to its true destiny.

Numbers larger than ten are no longer human: they fly from the hand into the imaginary sky we call hypothesis.

The only way to find out whether sexual selection has shaped human males for aggression is to leave the theory and go back to the evidence. There are two places to look for an answer. We can look at our bodies, and we can think about our minds. The easier part is our bodies.

A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive—and nowhere else!—and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.

No, he could not swallow the "just-happened" theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe—random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.

I'm very interested in Marxist theory. I disagree with it, but I keep thinking about it, because some Marxist theory does seem to work.

Yeah. I don't believe in monistic conspiracy theories where you pick out one group and blame everything on them, but I do tend to believe that conspiracy plays a larger role in human history than conventional historians admit.

Hitler was a trauma intellectually because of his batty theory of the Elders of Zion plotting to take over Europe; the horrible results of his paranoia created a prejudice about thinking about conspiracies at all. To talk of conspiracy is called the Devil Theory of History and historians make fun of it.

Freudians suggest that opiate addiction is an attempt to return to the womb. In keeping with our theory, it is more likely that opium and its derivatives return us to the "safe space" on the biosurvival circuit, the warm, snug place of bio-security; opiates may trigger neuro-transmitters* characteristic of breast-feeding.

Beethoven's music, I think, is often like that. Just when you think you recognize the pattern in his creative acts, he surprises you by a variation. Is that, maybe, why we sometimes feel such music is closer to experienced reality than any theory we can devise?

The hidden variable theory of consciousness asserts (1) there is a subquantal level beneath the observational/theoretical structure of ordinary quantum mechanics; (2) events occurring on this subquantal level are the elements of sentient being. In other words, in this model, consciousness is a function of the subquantal implicate order of Bohm, functioning non-locally.

So there we are. Aldous Huxley, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. John Lilly, philosopher Alan Watts and several other recent theorists have used this metaphor and this argument, usually without knowing that they were echoing Aleister Crowley.

Einstein's favorite line of criticism revolved around his claim that Quantum Mechanics, as known then (and as still known) may not constitute a complete theory of the subatomic realm. In ordinary language, this means that the Uncertainty and Indeterminacy of quantum equations — however useful these equations prove every day in technology — contains a possible hole through which an entirely new Quantum Theory may someday march.

Well, as explained in the last section, non-local correlations transcend causality and also subvert our traditional notions of space and time. If two particles — or events, or Whatnots — have a non-local correlation, in modern quantum theory, this means that they will remain correlated even when no signal, no field, no mechanical push-or-pull, no energy, no cause of any sort can travel from one to the other.

The only thing (or process) precisely equal to the universe remains the universe itself. Every description, or model, or theory, or art-work, or map, or reality-tunnel, or gloss, etc., remains somewhat smaller than the universe and hence includes less than the universe.