Quotes about theory
page 14

“.. the Place de l'Opera [in Paris] gives a better image of the new life than many theories. Its rhythms of opposition, twice repeated in its two directions, realizes a living equilibrium through the exactness of its execution.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian before 1930; as cited in 'The New Art – The New Life', Piet Mondrian, op. cit. Introd. Note 1., 1931
1930's

Life

“Postmodernism theory is one of those attempts: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an "age,"or zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation"any longer. Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Introduction
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Age, Way, Effort

“Today our main problem is that of organized complexity. Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, control, self-regulation, differentiation and the like are alien to conventional physics. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioural and social sciences, and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus, a basic problem posed to modern science is a general theory of organization.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Von Bertalanffy (1956) "General System Theory". In: General Systems, Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, vol. 1, 1956.
1950s

Problem, Science

“Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"More Light on Leaves", p. 165
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Failure

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

William James, in The Will to Believe (1897)
Misattributed

“Cicero is hardly to be reckoned … for he delighted so much more in the practice, than in the theory, of his art, that he is perpetualy drawn off from the rigid philosophical analysis of its principles, into discursive declamations, always eloquent indeed, and often highly interesting, but adverse to regularity of system, and frequently as unsatisfactory to the practical student as to the Philosopher.”

Richard Whately (1787–1863) English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian

Introduction, p. 19
Elements of Rhetoric (1828)

Art

“Put in a nut-shell, my thesis amounts to this. The repeated attempts made by Rudolf Carnap to show that the demarcation between science and metaphysics coincides with that between sense and nonsense have failed. The reason is that the positivistic concept of 'meaning' or 'sense' (or of verifiability, or of inductive confirmability, etc.) is inappropriate for achieving this demarcation — simply because metaphysics need not be meaningless even though it is not science. In all its variations demarcation by meaninglessness has tended to be at the same time too narrow and too wide: as against all intentions and all claims, it has tended to exclude scientific theories as meaningless, while failing to exclude even that part of metaphysics which is known as 'rational theology'.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

Ch 11. "The Demarcation between Science and Metaphysics." (Summary, p. 253)
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963)

Sense, Science, Time, Parting

“One of the evident facts about the world is the stability of empty space-time. In classical general relativity we can explain this as a consequence of the positive energy theorem… the positive energy theorem must extend in some suitable form to any viable quantum theory of gravity.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (Jun 10, 2014)

World, Time

“During the past three decades numerous empirical studies of economic behavior have been carried out and their theoretical foundation has been clarified. There was a rapid development and articulation of data, theory, and methodology. A new discipline of behavioral economics was emerging [which] consists of the empirical investigations of the behavior of businessmen and consumers in one country in one time. Generalizations about economic behavior emerge gradually by comparing behavior observed under different circumstances.”

George Katona (1901–1981) American psychologist

George Katona, and James N. Morgan (1980). Essays on behavioral economics. Univ of Michigan Survey Research. p. 3

Behavior, Study, Time, Past

“Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.”

William Whewell (1794–1866) English philosopher & historian of science

Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England, Lecture 7. (1852).

Truth, Error, Failure, Success

“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
1920s

Love, Women, Men, People

“A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.”

Jacques Monod (1910–1976) French biologist

Monod (1974) On the Molecular Theory of Evolution

Understanding, Thinking

“A second conspicuous landmark… is the enunciation of the fundamental law of radioactive disintegration by Rutherford and Soddy in 1903. This law was in no sense a consequence or development of Planck's theories; indeed fourteen years were to elapse before any connection was noticed between the two. The new law asserted that the atoms of radioactive substances broke up spontaneously, and not because of any particular conditions or special happenings. This seemed to involve an even more startling break with classical theory than the new laws of Planck; radioactive break-up appeared to be an effect without a cause, and suggested that the ultimate laws of nature were not even causal.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law, Nature, Sense, Appearance

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.”

Viola Spolin (1906–1994) American academic and acting theorist

Improvisation for the Theater 1963), page 4

People, Reality, Freedom, Memory

“Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification. I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle. To do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included. But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”

John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2

Life, Pleasure, Feeling, Imagination

“Trägårdh and his collaborator—a well-known Swedish historian and journalist named Henrik Berggre—put together their observations on individualism and formulated something they called “the Swedish theory of love.” The core idea is that authentic love and friendship are possible only between individuals who are independent and equal. This notion represents exactly the values that I grew up with and that I feel are most dear to Finns as well as people from the other Nordic nations, not just Swedes, so I like to call it “the Nordic theory of love.” For the citizens of the Nordic countries, the most important values in life are individual self-sufficiency and independence in relation to other members of the community.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Prologue
The Nordic Theory of Everything

Love, Life, Friendship, People

“̆̽The argument of the social theory developed in this book [works] out the idea that each imaginative and institutional form of society represents an attempt to freeze, into a particular mold, the more fluid experiences of practical and passionate relationship characterizing the immediate, relatively unreflective, uninterpreted, and undisciplined life of personality. The dogmas and arrangements inform this life and alter it. But they do not completely overcome its recalcitrance or determine its inner nature. The visionary impulse in politics draws much of its persuasive force from the appeal to this defiant experience.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 467

Life, Books, Imagination, Idea

“The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge. This transformation was signalled by McGregor, but we must go further.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Thomas Kochan, Wanda Orlikowski, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld. "Beyond McGregor's theory Y," in: Douglas McGregor (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise; Annotated Edition, 2006, p. 366

People, Nature, Knowledge

“The very name of my subject, economics, suggests economizing or maximizing. But Political Economy has gone a long way beyond home economics. Indeed, it is only in the last third of the century, within my own lifetime as a scholar, that economic theory has had many pretensions to being itself useful to the practical businessman or bureaucrat. I seem to recall that a great economist of the last generation, A. C. Pigou of Cambridge University, once asked the rhetorical question, “Who would ever think of employing an economist to run a brewery?” Well, today, under the guise of operational research and managerial economics, the fanciest of our economic tools are being utilized in enterprises both public and private.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 62: Lead paragraph

Way, Home, Question, Thinking

“I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2006, Human Events interview (2006)

Religion, Support, Appearance, Waiting

“You know my tendency is always to imagine things in my head and to work from this idea. I am going to explain my theory of blue, yellow and red, which will probably seem as 'Spanish' to you as my face.
Blue is the male principle, astringent and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, gay and spiritual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color to be opposed and overcome by the other two. For example, if you mix serious, spiritual blue with red, you intensify the blue to unbearable sorrow, and yellow the conciliatory, the complementary color to purple, becomes indispensable... If you mix red and yellow to make orange, you turn passive, feminine yellow into a Fury, with sensual force that again makes cool, spiritual blue indispensable, the man..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote in Franz Marc's letter to August Macke, Dec. 1910; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 129
1905 - 1910

Color, Imagination, Idea

“In Einstein's general theory of relativity the identity of these two coefficients, the gravitational and the inertial mass, is no longer a miracle, but a necessity, because gravitation and inertia are identical.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

“[Apple] events are tough for non-sycophants such as myself. I don't take everything Apple says at face value, as they would prefer. And I certainly don't buy into the theory that the world's most profitable company is in any way out to help humanity or make the world a better place.”

Paul Thurrott (1966) American podcaster, author, and blogger

Analysis: Apple's September 2017 Announcements http://thurrott.com/mobile/ios/134901/analysis-apples-september-2017-announcements in Thurrott - The Home For Tech Enthusiasts: News, Reviews & Analysis (13 September 2017)

World, Way, Help

“But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder. Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act. And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act,—at least in theory.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Capital Punishment

“Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Simon (1990) "Invariants of Human Behavior" in: Annu. Rev. Psychol. 41: p. 6.
1980s and later

People, Way, Behavior, Decision

“Some fundamental unity was surely to be discerned either in the matter or the structure of things. The Ionic philosophers chose the former field: Pythagoras took the latter. …The geometry which he had learnt in Egypt was merely practical. …It was natural to nascent philosophy to draw, by false analogies, and the use of a brief and deceptive vocabulary, enormous conclusions from a very few observed facts: and it is not surprising if Pythagoras, having learnt in Egypt that number was essential to the exact description of forms and of the relations of forms, concluded that number was the cause of form and so of every other quality. Number, he inferred, is quantity and quantity is form and form is quality.
Footnote2 Primitive men, on seeing a new thing, look out especially for some resemblance in it to a known thing, so that they may call both by the same name. This developes a habit of pressing small and partial analogies. It also causes many meanings to be at attached to the same word. Hasty and confused theories are the inevitable result.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Men, Nature, Drawing, Falseness

“[In France] a minister has twenty assistants, where the Administrative Theory says that a manager at the head of a big undertaking should not have more than five or six.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Henri Fayol cited in: Morgen Witzel (2001) Organization Behaviour, 1890-1940, Volume 1. p. 191

“Systems theory pursues the scientific exploration and understanding of systems that exist in the various realms of experience, in order to arrive at a general theory of systems: an organized expressing of sets of interrelated concepts and principles that apply to all systems.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 31

Understanding

“Christian conservatives are claiming that the hit documentary March of the Penguins supports the theory of intelligent design. Meanwhile, backers of evolution claim that intelligent design is refuted in the documentary March of the Bonaduces.”

Amy Poehler (1971) American actress

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/05/05aupdate.phtml
Weekend Update samples

Intelligence, Support

“The Good Economist Hayek is the thinker who has mind-blowing insights into just why the competitive market system is such a marvelous societal device for coordinating our by now 7.2 billion-wide global division of labor. Few other economists imagined that Lenin’s centrally-planned economy behind the Iron Curtain was doomed to settle at a level of productivity 1/5 that of the capitalist industrial market economies outside. Hayek did so imagine. And Hayek had dazzling insights as to why. Explaining the thought of this Hayek requires not sociology or history of thought but rather appreciation, admiration, and respect for pure genius.The Bad Economist Hayek is the thinker who was certain that Keynes had to be wrong, and that the mass unemployment of the Great Depression had to have in some mysterious way been the fault of some excessively-profligate government entity (or perhaps of those people excessively clever with money–fractional-reserve bankers, and those who claim not the natural increase of flocks but rather the interest on barren gold). Why Hayek could not see with everybody else–including Milton Friedman–that the Great Depression proved that Say’s Law was false in theory, and that aggregate demand needed to be properly and delicately managed in order to make Say’s Law true in practice is largely a mystery. Nearly everyone else did: the Lionel Robbinses and the Arthur Burnses quickly marked their beliefs to market after the Great Depression and figured out how to translate what they thought into acceptable post-World War II Keynesian language. Hayek never did.
My hypothesis is that the explanation is theology: For Hayek, the market could never fail. For Hayek, the market could only be failed. And the only way it could be failed was if its apostles were not pure enough.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Focus/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014 http://equitablegrowth.org/making-sense-friedrich-von-hayek-focusthe-honest-broker-week-august-9-2014/ (2014)

Money, War, People, World

“This book is intended as an exploratory sketch of a revolutionary scientific perspective and conceptual framework as it might be applied to sociocultural systems. This point of view and still developing framework, as interpreted here, stems from the General Systems Research movement and the now closely allied fields of Cybernetics and information or communication theory.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. vii.

Books, Communication

“In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined. Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events, connectable by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well-defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.”

David Bohm book Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)

Reality

“It is a question of going beyond the description of mechanisms of interaction between locations and activities, in order to discover the structural laws of the production and functioning of the spatial forms studied… There is no specific theory of space, but quite simply a deployment and specification of the theory of social structure, in order to account for the characteristics of the particular social form, space and its articulation with other historically given, form and processes.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 124 as quoted in: Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin (2010) Key Thinkers on Space and Place. p. 101

Law, Question, Study

“For all the promises Trump is breaking, there is one he has kept without wavering: his vow to be unpredictable. … Some suggest that there is a method to Trump’s madness, that he is trying to make would-be adversaries think he is irrational and capricious, thereby making foes and rivals wary of pushing him too far. … But in Trump’s application of the Madman Theory there seems to be less theory than madman. There may be advantages to keeping foes and opponents off guard, but Trump is baffling friends and allies, too. In foreign affairs, unpredictability spooks allies and spreads instability. And unpredictable policy at home has long been seen as toxic for business. … The widespread chaos suggests Trump isn’t signaling new policies as much as he’s winging it. His unpredictability is not a theory. It’s the absence of one.”

Dana Milbank (1968) American journalist

Trump’s one consistent policy: Chaos https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-one-consistent-policy-chaos/2016/12/06/f1a5a5ae-bbf7-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?utm_term=.f664c9ebc888, The Washington Post (December 6, 2016)

Home, Business, Thinking, Madness

“Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter V, TRANSFORMATION, p. 203.

“Strong, weak and electromagnetic interaction are evidently part of a grand unified theory. These temperatures are today quite inaccessible. They were achieved only in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. Since then, the universe has congealed, losing its symmetry.”

Sheldon L. Glashow (1932) American theoretical physicist

Source: The Charm of Physics (1991), p. 244

Strong, Universe, Parting

“Although there are as many ‘new institutionalisms’ as there are social science disciplines, this book is about just one of them, the one that has made its mark on organisation theory, especially that branch most closely associated with sociology.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 1

Books, Science

“I have tried to make clear in this brief sketch of the nature of deductively formulated theories, at least as they occur in economics, that, although their origin lies in common observation and introspection, nevertheless they are capable of a purely mathematical development through the exact statement of a of a set of postulates which, however, since they must inevitably contain assumptions about human behaviour, require to be tested by reference to actual events.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

Source: The Role of Measurement in Economics. 1951, p. 14-15

Mathematics, Nature

“Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

Unsourced variant: Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn't even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science. Popper later retracted his criticisms: I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. :* "Natural selection and the emergence of mind" dialectica http://www.dialectica.ch/ Vol. 32 (1978), p. 339-355; republished in Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge (1987) edited by Gerard Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley, III Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976)

“The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs book The End of Poverty

The End of Poverty" The End of Poverty, 2005

Time

“Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

S. 41
The Web of Belief (1970)

“The standard SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) theory of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions appears to correctly describe physics down to the smallest distance scales yet probed.”

Leonard Susskind (1940) American physicist

[1984, The gauge hierarchy problem, technicolor, supersymmetry, and all that, Physics Reports, 104, 2–4, 181–193, 10.1016/0370-1573(84)90208-4]

Strong, Appearance

“According to the big bang theory the universe is only 13 billion years old… We made some observations a year ago which we are still trying to explain but the simplest explanation seems to be that there stars that are 20 billion years old.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Jayant Narlikar's Cosmology

Star, Universe

“Their coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence which is the reason England is home to every shade of political exile. They don't give asylum out of respect for asylum-seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty, and they know it, and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it's liberty.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Herzen
The Coast of Utopia: Salvage (2002)

Home, Confidence, Personality

“At first it might seem that quantum mechanics (QM), which began with Einstein's photon as the explanation for the photoelectric effect in 1905, goes further in the direction of discreteness. But the wave-particle duality discovered by de Broglie in 1925 is at the heart of QM, which means that this theory is profoundly ambiguous regarding the question of discreteness vs. continuity. QM can have its cake and eat it too, because discreteness is modeled via standing waves (eigenfunctions) in a continuous medium.”

Gregory Chaitin (1947) Argentinian mathematician and computer scientist

How real are real numbers? https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0411418 arXiv:math/0411418v3 (2004). p. 12

Question, Heart

“Well, which is the most rational theory about these ten millions of species? Is it most likely that there have been ten millions of special creations? or is it most likely that, by continual modifications due to change of circumstances, ten millions of varieties have been produced, as varieties are being produced still?”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

The Development Hypothesis (1852)

Change

“Science progresses by trial and error, by conjectures and refutations. Only the fittest theories survive.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 5, Introducing falsification, p. 60.

Error, Science

“In 1763 a Croatian Jesuit named Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711 - 1787) identified the ultimate implication of this mechanical atomic theory. One of the crucial aspects of Isaac Newton's laws of motion is their predictive capability. If we know how an object is moving at any instant - how fast, and in which direction - and if, furthermore, we know the forces acting on it, we can calculate its future trajectory exactly. This predictability made it possible for astronomers to use Newton's laws of motion and gravity to calculate, for example, when future solar eclipses would happen.
Boscovich realized that if all the world is just atoms in motion and collision, then an all-seeing mind "could, from a continuous arc described in an interval of time, no matter how small, by all points of matter, derive the law [that is, a universal map] of forces itself … Now, if the law of forces were known, and the position, velocity and direction of all the points at any given instant, it would be possible for a mind of this type to foresee all the necessary subsequent motions and states, and to predict all the phenomena that necessarily followed from them."”

Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787) Croat-Italian physicist

Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (2006).

World, Law, Universe, Time

“I will not be proposing a course which has been under some public discussion recently — deficit financing. It is wholly inappropriate to our economic situation. In its least extreme form it is based on the theory that additional money generated by a Government deficit (and given currency, as necessary, by use of the printing press) will stimulate consumption and thereby production, in time to match the excess money with goods before real inflationary harm is done. Unfortunately we don't, and can't, produce more than a small fraction of what we consume, and increased consumption would merely mean increased imports without matching exports; and a severe balance of payment crisis, which would destroy Hong Kong's credit and confidence in the Hong Kong dollar; and which we could not cure without coming close to ruining ourselves. Keynes was not writing with our situation in mind. In this hard world we have to earn before we spend.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

February 27, 1963, page 50.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Money, World, Confidence, Time

“I reproach myself for a gross error. But I would reproach myself more if I had persisted in an error after observations revealed it clearly to be that. I made a deal of money in the late 1940s on the bull side, ignoring Satchel Paige’s advice to Lot’s wife, “Never look back.” Rather I would advocate Samuelson’s Law: “Always look back. You may learn something from your residuals. Usually one’s forecasts are not so good as one remembers them; the difference may be instructive.” The dictum “If you must forecast, forecast often,” is neither a joke nor a confession of impotence. It is a recognition of the primacy of brute fact over pretty theory. That part of the future that cannot be related to the present’s past is precisely what science cannot hope to capture. Fortunately, there is plenty of work for science to do, plenty of scientific tasks not yet done.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates
1980s–1990s

Money, Law, Hope, Error

“Our understanding of how markets and businesses operate was passed down to us more than a century ago by a handful of European economists — Alfred Marshall in England and a few of his contemporaries on the continent. It is an understanding based squarely upon the assumption of diminishing returns: products or companies that get ahead in a market eventually run into limitations, so that a predictable equilibrium of prices and market shares is reached. The theory was roughly valid for the bulk-processing, smokestack economy of Marshall’s day. And it still thrives in today’s economics textbooks. But steadily and continuously in this century, Western economies have undergone a transformation from bulk - material manufacturing to design and use of technology — from processing of resources to processing of information, from application of raw energy to application of ideas. As this shift has occurred, the underlying mechanisms that determine economic behavior have shifted from ones of diminishing to ones of increasing returns.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Arthur, W. Brian. "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business." Harvard business review 74.4 (1996): p. 100

Behavior, Idea, Understanding, Business

“The implication of game theory, which is also the implication of the third image, is, however, that the freedom of choice of any one state is limited by the actions of the others.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter VII, Some Implications Of The Third Image, p. 204

Game, Freedom

“Probably Greek logistic, or calculation, extended to more difficult operations… and… probably Greek arithmetic, or theory of numbers, owed much more to induction than is permitted to appear by its first and chief professors.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Appearance

“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Democracy

“Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Source: "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," 1981, p. 67; As cited in: Paul K. Mose (2002). Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, p. 21

Sense, Falseness

“That classical theory had catastrophic implications for the constitution of matter was barely appreciated by Planck and others at the turn of the century, and played no substantial role in the development of quantum theory until Bohr's work 13 years later.
The lesson that could be drawn from this, and also from the development of general relativity, is that a crisis will only become creative if it is formulated in a mathematically precise manner. This conclusion has an echo in Bell's insistence on having quantum mechanics "fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist", but what it really calls for is a critique of the "orthodox" theory fully formulated in mathematical terms with nothing left to the discretion of the critic.”

Kurt Gottfried (1929) American physicist

Does quantum mechanics carry the seeds of its own destruction? (1991)

Mathematics

“Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Source: Managers Not MBAs (2005), p. 362

Parting

“Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a "theory of criticism," a "theoretical hermeneutic" are, today, the masters of the academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned "the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining from the immense prestige and confidence of science and technology an instrument ontologically inapplicable to their own material. They would enclose water in a sieve.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 75).

Truth, Art, Confidence, Water

“We cannot wait until we agree upon the truths of a new social theory to think and act as democratic experimentalists. We must find the ideas our efforts and commitments require, and try to make no assumptions that the facts of social reality and historical experience invalidate.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 15

Truth, Idea, Thinking, Reality

“The second part of the book… contains an exposition of the first principles of the theory of complex quantities; hitherto, the very elements of this theory have not been easily accessible to the English student, except recently in Prof. Chrystal's excellent treatise on Algebra. The subject of Analytical Trigonometry has been too frequently presented to the student in the state in which it was left by Euler, before the researches of Cauchy, Abel, Gauss, and others, had placed the use of imaginary quantities, and especially the theory of infinite series and products, where real or complex quantities are involved, on a firm scientific basis. In the Chapter on the exponential theorem and logarithms, I have ventured to introduce the term "generalized logarithm" for the doubly infinite series of values of the logarithm of a quantity.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

A Treatise on Plane Trigonometry https://books.google.com/books?id=_ktLAAAAMAAJ (1891) Preface

Books, Parting

“Today perhaps the most popular organizational theory is institutional theory.”

Richard M. Burton (1939)

Richard M. Burton, ‎Bo Eriksen, ‎Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson (2006). Organization Design: The Evolving State-of-the-Art. p. 28

“Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Conclusion: political Criticism, p. 172
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Failure

“A very plausible choice for when inflation might have happened would be when the energy scales of the universe were at the scale of grand unified theories… which unify the weak, strong and electromagnetic interactions into a single unified interaction... we're talking about energies which are about 1016 times the equivalent energy of a proton mass. …the initial patch would only have to be the ridiculously small size of about 10-28 cm across to be able to lead ultimately to the creation of everything that we see on the vast scale of which we see it.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Strong, Universe, Time

“It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Fantastic Metropolis, Christmas Editorial (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/20011209/3/)

“If a 19th century capitalist Machiavelli had wished to cripple the socialist intelligentsia of the 20th century, he could have invented no more cogent weapon than the labour theory of value. Yet this theory was the invention, not of a defender of capitalism, but of its greatest critic: Karl Marx.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 13, Nothing To Lose But Their Minds, p. 270–271 (See also: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VI, p. 58)

“I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analyzed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is poison.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)

“But a kind of genius can come of this deprivation of sensation, of experience. It has been mistaken as naïve intelligence, when in fact it is empty intelligence, pure intelligence. The composition of the mind is altered. Its previous cultivation is disintegrated and it has greater access to the brain, the body: it is Supersanity. Learning is turned inside out. You have to start from the top and work your way down. You must study mathematical theory before simple arithmetic; theoretical physics before applied physics; anatomy, you might say, before you can walk.”

Jack Abbott book In the Belly of the Beast

In the Belly of the Beast (1981)

Way, Intelligence, Mathematics, Study

“Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to Linux kernel mailing list, 2009-03-25, Torvalds, Linus, 2009-03-25 http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/3/25/632, 2000s, 2009

Time

“I hope none who hear me will confound this expression of mine with advocacy of the right of a state to remain in the Union, and to disregard its constitutional obligations by the nullification of the law. Such is not my theory. Nullification and secession, so often confounded, are indeed antagonistic principles. Nullification is a remedy which it is sought to apply within the Union, and against the agent of states. It is only to be justified when the agent has violated his constitutional obligation, and a state, assuming to judge for itself, denies the right of the agent thus to act, and appeals to the other states of the Union for a decision; but when the states themselves, and when the people of the states, have so acted as to convince us that they will not regard our constitutional rights, then, and then for the first time, arises the doctrine of secession in its practical application.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

1860s, Speech before the U.S. Senate (1861)

People, Law, Hope, Decision

“The elucidation of the theory of centripetal and disturbing forces is necessarily less complete. Still… a general conception of the nature of the action of those forces… sufficient to preserve the student from the gross errors… may be obtained from explanations like those here offered. The methods of ascertaining the weight of the Earth and other bodies are… more difficult of explanation; yet… something may be done even in these.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Error, Nature

“How we come to have the world-views we do is an interesting question. No doubt reason plays a part, but human needs for meaning and purpose are usually more important. At times personal taste may be what decides the issue. There is nothing to say that, when all the work of reason is done, only one view of the world will remain. There may be many that fit everything that can be known. In that case you might as well choose the view of the world you find most interesting or beautiful. Adopting a world-view is more like selecting a painting to furnish a room than testing a scientific theory. The test is how it fits with your life.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Freedom for Über-Marionettes: What Science Won't Tell You (p. 150)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Life, World, Beauty, Question

“A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Saturday Review (1859)
1850s

“The ‘theory of control systems’ in engineering is now a well-developed subject, making use of some remarkably powerful concepts and methods of analysis, especially in relation to problems of stabilization and the prevention of unwanted oscillations.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. v

Problem

“We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote of John Cage: the last lines of his 'Autobiographical Statement', April, 1990 http://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html 1990s

People, School, Music, Change

“The prevailing economic theory of business enterprise and behavior, the maximization of profit—which is simply a complicated way of phrasing the old saw of buying cheap and selling dear—may adequately explain how Richard Sears operated. But it cannot explain how Sears, Roebuck or any other business enterprise operates, nor how it should operate. The concept of profit maximization is, in fact, meaningless.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 59 (1986 ; 45)

Way, Behavior, Business

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

Philippe Baumard (1968) French academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People, School, Faith, Way

“Well, you know, people always ask me what makes Creature from the Black Lagoon hold up after all these years. I always say that if you look at the movie, the storyline starts with the Big Bang. Then it goes to the creation of man, and you see evolution with man coming out of the sea. The theory today is that man DID come out of the sea. These are issues that men today are STILL dwelling on. Was man created? Or, was man evolved? So, that's why if you watch Creature, you're not bored because it still makes sense.”

Ben Chapman (actor)

Ben Champman Interview https://www.the-reelgillman.com/interviews/10_1_02.html (November 1, 2002)

Men, People, Sense, Sea

“I like technical players who can also think in terms of the team's interests. I've already mentioned Iniesta and Xavi, who disprove entirely the theory that only physically strong footballers with a lot of running ability can play in their positions.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

reported in Johan Cruyff (2016). My Turn: The Autobiography.

Thinking, Strong, Football

“Humans… entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires…. People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 188

People, World, Law, Art

“As the title of his 1941 book indicates, the theory of capital lay at the heart of his theory of the cycle. The reason is that he attributes the cycle not to changes in aggregate demand, or even to changes in the quantity of capital, but to changes in the structure of production and hence the structure of the capital stock. In this, his theory was highly unusual: one of the reasons for his failure to engage more effectively with Keynes was the latter’s inability to see how the theory of capital could be of any importance for the cycle. Because the theory of capital is so central, and because it is so complex, it needs to be explained carefully. After that, the rest of his theory falls into place comparatively easily.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006

Books, Failure, Change, Heart

“I did not call him "Fritz." To me he remained always "Professor Hayek," despite his own graciousness in treating me as a peer. I shall not attempt to evaluate Professor Hayek's monumental contribution to our understanding of the events of this turbulent century, to the influence of his ideas on these events themselves or even to the development of economic theory in a strictly scientific sense.”

James M. Buchanan (1919–2013) American economist

"I did not call him “Fritz”: Personal recollections of Professor F. A. v. Hayek." Constitutional Political Economy 3.2 (1992): 129-135.

Idea, Understanding, Sense

“According to Goldschmidt, all that evolution by the usual mutations—dubbed "micromutations"—can accomplish is to bring about "diversification strictly within species, usually, if not exclusively, for the sake of adaptation of the species to specific conditions within the area which it is able to occupy." New species, genera, and higher groups arise at once, by cataclysmic saltations—termed macromutations or systematic mutations—which bring about in one step a basic reconstruction of the whole organism. The role of natural selection in this process becomes "reduced to the simple alternative: immediate acceptance or rejection." A new form of life having been thus catapulted into being, the details of its structures and functions are subsequently adjusted by micromutation and selection. It is unnecessary to stress here that this theory virtually rejects evolution as this term is usually understood (to evolve means to unfold or to develop gradually), and that the systematic mutations it postulates have never been observed. It is possible to imagine a mutation so drastic that its product becomes a monster hurling itself beyond the confines of species, genus, family, or class. But in what Goldschmidt has called the "hopeful monster" the harmonious system, which any organism must necessarily possess, must be transformed at once into a radically different, but still sufficiently coherent, system to enable the monster to survive. The assumption that such a prodigy may, however rarely, walk the earth overtaxes one's credulity, even though it may be right that the existence of life in the cosmos is in itself an extremely improbable event.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky book Genetics and the Origin of Species

Genetics and the Origin of Species (1941) 2nd revised edition

Life, Family, Hope, Imagination

“Cybernetics as a specific field grew out of a series of interdisciplinary meetings held from 1944 to 1953 that brought together a number of noted post-war intellectuals, including Wiener, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Hosted by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, these became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. From its original focus on machines and animals, cybernetics quickly broadened to encompass minds (e. g. in the work of Bateson and Ashby) and social systems (e. g. Stafford Beer's management cybernetics), thus recovering Plato's original focus on the control relations in society.
Through the 1950s, cybernetic thinkers came to cohere with the school of General Systems Theory (GST), founded at about the same time by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, as an attempt to build a unified science by uncovering the common principles that govern open, evolving systems. GST studies systems at all levels of generality, whereas Cybernetics focuses more specifically on goal-directed, functional systems which have some form of control relation.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics (2001), p.2 Cited in: " Notes on Heylighen 2001 http://thinkipedia.wikispaces.com/Notes+on+Heylighen+2001" at thinkipedia.wikispaces.com, 2013

War, School, Beer, Study

“Kuhn's theory suffers from a fatal flaw. It explains the succession from one paradigm to another in sociological or psychological terms, rather than as having primarily to do with the objective merit of the rival explanations. Yet unless one understands science as a quest for explanations, the fact that it does find successive explanations, each objectively better than the last, is inexplicable.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch. 13; commentary on the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, as presented in the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Understanding, Suffering, Science, Success

“Even though it is, properly speaking, a postprediction, in the sense that the experiment was made before the theory, the fact that gravity is a consequence of string theory, to me, is one of the greatest theoretical insights ever.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996)

Sense

“The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.”

Bernard Bailyn book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter III, POWER AND LIBERTY A THEORY OF POLITICS, p. 55.

Literature

“General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 8

People, Mathematics, Sense, Study

“I have a theory of my own about what this art of the novel is, and how it came into being. To begin with, it does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, The Tale of Genji (1925–1933), Ch. 25: 'The Glow-Worm'

Men, Art, Passion, Heart

“No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory, than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.”

Albert Einstein book Relativity: The Special and the General Theory

Es ist das schönste Los einer physikalischen Theorie, wenn sie selbst zur Aufstellung einer umfassenden Theorie den Weg weist, in welcher sie als Grenzfall weiterlebt.
Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (1920) Tr. Robert W. Lawson, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1920) pp. 90-91.
1920s

Way

“The Koran says nothing about the proper form of government. If the Koran is a document approved by God, either in whole or in part, that silence is deliberate, and if that silence is deliberate that must mean that we have room to manoeuvre, to innovate and to experiment with the different forms of government. So in theory Islam is compatible with the separation of religion and state.”

Irshad Manji (1968) Feminist from Canada, author, journalist, activist

God, Religion, Silence, Parting

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Life, People, Age, World

“Cultural and behavioral scholars are uneasy about this use of their studies. Fortunately, the intellectual tide has begun to turn. Increasing numbers of economists have come to realize that standard economic theory is just as applicable to the scarcity problems that confront low income countries as to the corresponding problems of high income countries.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

"The Economics of Being Poor," (1979)

Behavior, Problem, Study, Country

“The classical concept of 'physical entity', be it particle, wave, field or system, has become a problematic concept since the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The recent developments in modern quantum mechanics, with the performance of delicate and precise experiments involving single quantum entities, manifesting explicit non-local behavior for these entities, brings essential new information about the nature of the concept of entity.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Aerts, D. (1998). " The entity and modern physics: the creation-discovery view of reality. http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/aerts/publications/1998EntModPhys.pdf" In E. Castellani (Ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics (pp. 223-257). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Behavior, Nature

“The classical theory of probability was devoted mainly to a study of the gamble's gain, which is again a random variable; in fact, every random variable can be interpreted as the gain of a real or imaginary gambler in a suitable game.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter IX, Random Variables; Expectation, p. 212.

Game, Study