“The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present. Yet the theory has powerful emotional appeal. Usually that appeal is strongest for conservatives, who can't stand the thought that positive action by governments (let alone—horrors!—printing money) can ever be a good idea. Some libertarians extol the Austrian theory, not because they have really thought that theory through, but because they feel the need for some prestigious alternative to the perceived statist implications of Keynesianism. And some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors. But moderates and liberals are not immune to the theory's seductive charms—especially when it gives them a chance to lecture others on their failings.”

— Paul Krugman

"The Hangover Theory", Slate (Dec. 4, 1998)

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Paul Krugman 106

American economist 1953

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“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Sometimes ascribed to Virginia Woolf, but it appeared as early as 1854 in Anna Jameson's A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies, where it is ascribed to William Wordsworth.
Misattributed

“Thought and theory must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Attributed by Anna Jameson in her A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies (1854).

“We have seen that Rawls’ theory of justice requires for its coherence a conception of community in the constitutive sense, which requires in turn a notion of agency in the cognitive sense, and we have hound that Rawls’ theory of the good can allow for neither. This calls into question the theory of justice, or the thoery of the good, or both.”

Michael J. Sandel book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

Ch 4. Justice and the Good
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 1998

“A theory, is a body of knowledge, that is supportive of, and explanative of facts. Scientific laws are included within a theory, facts are included within a theory, that's why you have the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity. There is no concept in creationism, which meets any of the qualifications of a scientific theory, none. You have no facts, you have no laws, you have no evidence, you have no explanative power. All you have, is whatever science can't explain, you pretend you can.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Reason Rally Ra Rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isrST6wOUJA (March 28, 2012)

“String theory was not invented to describe gravity; instead it originated in an attempt to describe the strong interactions, wherein mesons can be thought of as open strings with quarks at their ends. The fact that the theory automatically described closed strings as well, and that closed strings invariably produced gravitons and gravity, and that the resulting quantum theory of gravity was finite and consistent is one of the most appealing aspects of the theory.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"Einstein and the Search for Unification", p. 10 https://books.google.com/books?id=rEaUIxukvy4C&pg=PA10, in The legacy of Albert Einstein: a collection of essays in celebration of the year of physics (2007)

“Keynes was an applied economist who turned to inventing theory because the theory he had inherited could not properly explain what was happening.”

Robert Skidelsky (1939) Economist and author

Source: John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2003), Ch. 27. Portraits of an Unusual Economist

“The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.”

Thomas Pynchon book V.

Source: V. (1963), Chapter Seven, Part VII
Context: He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing the world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-show Sydney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.
But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it.

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Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Ginker (1964) as cited in: S. Nassir Ghaemi (2009) The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model. p. 24

“Thought = creation. If these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions (good or bad) that speeds the creation”

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“If gravity is a fundamental force, then it has to be explained by an expanded version of general relativity, a more complete, a more fundamental theory. Whether that is quantum gravity of something more radical that requires a paradigm shift like, for instance, our research in multiverse theory, nobody knows at the moment.”

Laura Mersini-Houghton (1969) Albanian cosmologist and theoretical physicist

[Why Is Gravity So Elusive? Frank Wilczek, Erik Verlinde, Laura Mersini-Houghton, 4 December 2017, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lui9qZ6cDs] 11:20 of 40:44

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Paul Krugman 106

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