“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”
Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”
Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist
"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006
“In capitalism, communists are always better”
Adonis Georgiadis (1972) Greek politician
As he said in Epsilon TV (12 May 2018)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZIbFJPreBQ&t=1094s
Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist
Vol. I, Ch. 25, Section 2, pg. 686.
(Buch I) (1867)
“I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Unarmed Victory (1963), p. 14
1960s
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)
Context: To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster. But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction. The experience of John Brown illustrates the evil of the revolutionary short-cut to ultimate good ends. The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection. The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth. It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused. John Brown rendered a great service to the cause of liberty in the earlier Kansas days; but his notion that the evils of slavery could be cured by a slave insurrection was a delusion analogous to the delusions of those who expect to cure the evils of plutocracy by arousing the baser passions of workingmen against the rich in an endeavor at violent industrial revolution. And, on the other hand, the brutal and shortsighted greed of those who profit by what is wrong in the present system, and the attitude of those who oppose all effort to do away with this wrong, serve in their turn as incitements to such revolution; just as the insolence of the ultra pro-slavery men finally precipitated the violent destruction of slavery.
Albert K. Cohen (1918–2014) American criminologist
Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, p.40
Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist
Workers Councils (1947), Section 2.5
Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher
Žižek! (2005); as Žižek notes on p. 1 of Mapping Ideology (1994), the observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than the end of capitalism was originally made by Fredric Jameson.
John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer
Interview with Left Voice (2017)