Quotes About Theory

This is a book about America's demons. Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of the theory itself.

T]he psychoanalytic process should be understood as occurring between subjects rather than within the individual. Mental life is seen from an intersubjective perspective. Although this perspective has transformed both our theory and our practice in important ways, such transformations create new problems. A theory in which the individual subject no longer reigns absolute must confront the difficulty each subject has in recognizing the other as an equivalent center of experience…

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

What most likely caused the second event was the rupture of a main steam line, carrying steam under extreme pressure. This was Turner's theory from the beginning.

Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of scientific theory of interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism is not.

Marxism, however, is not primarily a theory of class structure; it is above all a theory of class struggle.

He who possesses a reasonable, sound theoretical equipment will perceive correctly, however neurotic or wicked he may be personally; he who lacks it or possesses an unsound one, will perceive incorrectly, however pure of neurotic tensions or compulsions he may be.

This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Whereas traditional reductionism sought to find the commonality underlying diversity in reference to a shared substance, such as material atoms, contemporary systems theory seeks to find common features in terms of shared aspects of organization.

The "symptom" theory goes as follows: An affair simply alerts us to a preexisting condition, either a troubled relationship or a troubled person.

Hence, popular theory holds that women's jealousy is primarily emotional, whereas men's is sexual. Interestingly, the research shows the reverse among homosexuals: lesbian women tend to express more sexual jealousy than gay men, and gay men cop to more emotional jealousy than lesbians. Arguably, this reversal highlights that we feel most threatened where we feel least secure.

Mustafa Kemal was convinced, and ordered that the theory should be taught at the new university in Ankara. He told a young French financial expert, Hervé Alphand, that his name was Turkish as it comprised the words alp (champion) and han (or khan, a ruler). In confirmation, Mustafa Kemal felt Alphand's skull: it was, he decided, brachycephalic, the characteristic skull-shape of the Turkish race.11

As my hero Richard Feynman would say, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

We investigators often forget to look at things from an extremely paranoid point of view. If your theory of what someone would normally do isn't helping you catch the person, you have to assume they were doing something abnormal.

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

Richard Feynman would say, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is; it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

Systems can go laterally through space. Others move linearly through time.

Even testing a theory and reaching an expected conclusion doesn't really "prove" it in the sense that people think. It only changes the degree of certainty.

A scientist is someone trying to see order in chaos. Sometimes it simply can't be done, as science tells us via quantum mechanics and chaos theory. A thing can

The theory of Woodrow Wilson's era was that the Thirteenth Amendment did not apply to the government and that, when in war, the government could force individuals into the military or into a specific labor market.

spacetime model, we might now reasonably ask what is the momentum of the car through time. The answer, fairly obviously, is that

If someone was to tell you that the sum of all the numbers was minus one twelfth I suspect you might imagine the person was mildly crazy. Well, this is actually an established mathematical fact: the sum of all the numbers is minus one twelfth (or, in decimals, -0.083).

each elementary particle is paired with a superpartner particle. However, the LHC has not detected any of these predicted

The combined speed of any object's motion through space and its motion through time is always precisely equal to the speed of light.