Quotes About Theories

Theories are great, they sound great, but the minute you are asked to prove one in actual life, why the thing blows up.

if evidence supports established theories then that evidence will be accepted. But if evidence undermines established theories, then that evidence must be rejected.

For those who think that the NDE has been satisfactorily explained by science, their advice is sobering: "Theories proposed thus far consist largely of unsupported speculations about what might be happening during an NDE".111

Crank theories always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

The conflict of theories, leading, as it eventually must, to the survival of the fittest, is advantageous.

When, however, it is proposed to imbue the mind of a crowd with ideas and beliefs—with modern social theories, for instance—the leaders have recourse to different expedients. The principal of them are three in number and clearly defined—affirmation, repetition, and contagion. Their action is somewhat slow, but its effects, once produced, are very lasting.

Over the years, Ellis had dealt with many eccentric hedge fund traders. A shockingly large number were given to wild mood swings and nutty investment theories.

Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories.

Even though it was only my second year of practice I had already formulated certain rules about this and one was that it was always the biggest men who went down. (I had, by this time, worked out a few other, perhaps unscientific theories, e.g. big dogs were kept by people who lived in little houses and vice versa. Clients who said 'spare no expense' never paid their bills, ever. When I asked my way in the Dales and was told 'you can't mis it', I knew I'd soon be hopelessly lost.)

Neither he nor she had had any such adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all. Sometimes in return for his theories, she gave out some fact of her own life. With almost maternal solicitude, she urged him to let his nature open to the full; she became his confessor.

Although the theories of conquered provinces, state suicide, and the like did not disappear, the "republican form of government" clause became by 1863 [Page 703] the basis for both presidential and congressional approaches to reconstruction.

People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about one of the theories that we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don't know.

We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units.

Few of the writers I have described in this chapter are meticulous or systematic thinkers. Their theories don't hold water; their books are jam-packed with errors and omissions and preposterous interpretations. But backlash readers don't mind; theirs is an intensely personal politics

As dysfunctional as they may be on occasion, our theories, preconceptions, and "biases" are what make us smart.

Social theorists may be considered as belonging to the Zuni-like culture of scholars. Such cultures select persons who have repressed their emotions in the service of intellectual goals and develop norms and procedures which maintain the dominance of intellect over feeling. Scholarly theories of the human experience which exclude emotions are both product and causes of repression.

Perhaps our judgement of the purple woman was unfair. No doubt her theories concerning the "approach of the Teatro" made us all uneasy. But was this reason enough to cast her out from that artistic underworld which was the only society available to her? Like many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She had been permanently stigmatized by too closely associating herself with something unclean in its essence.

Theories of consciousness have cultural consequences.

All these theories are motivated by an epistemological criterion of reality—that only what can be understood in a certain way exists.

There is nothing so absurd which some philosophers have not maintained.

It seems to me that-at least in our scientific theories of behavior-we have failed to accept the simple fact that human relations are inherently fraught with difficulties and that to make them even relatively harmonious requires much patience and hard work.

I'm not good at normal-people small talk. I always want to get weird. Start a conversation about wildly unfounded conspiracy theories. Liminal spaces. Dermoids.

Oh, come off your perch! said the other man, who wore glasses. Your premises won't come out in the wash. You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag. You can't pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it.

The ugly truth is that other than Feynman's sum-over theories there is no believable explanation of quantum mechanics that does not involve human consciousness. Of course this raises the questions as to how it managed to get along without us.