Quotes about theory
page 7

“Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.”

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

A Little Book in C Major, New York, NY, John Lane Company (1916) p. 51
1910s

God

“Complexity has always been difficult to resolve and to understand. Evolutionary biologists were among the first scientists to recognize this problem, when they dug their way toward new theories about evolution. They discovered that matter does not lack purpose.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 129

Way, Understanding, Problem

“The modern theory that you should always treat the religious convictions of other people with profound respect finds no support in the Gospels. Mutual tolerance of religious views is the product not of faith, but of doubt.”

Arnold Lunn (1888–1974) British writer and skier

Now I See http://books.google.com/books?id=fEXZAAAAMAAJ&q=%22The+modern+theory+that+you+should+always+treat+the+religious+convictions+of+other+people+with+profound+respect+finds+no+support+in+the+Gospels+Mutual+tolerance+of+religious+views+is+the+product+not+of+faith+but+of+doubt%22&pg=PA101#v=onepage (1933)

People, Faith, Support

“Besides, large-scale general plans : 1) they will seek to break the bonds between earth and heaven, doing their best to spread, on a large scale, atheistic and materialistic theories, degrading the Romanian people, or even just its leaders, to a people separated from God and its dead, they will kill them, not with the spear, but by cutting the roots of their spiritual life; 2) they will then break the links of the race with the soil, material spring of its wealth, attacking nationalism and any idea of Fatherland and homeland; determined to succeed, they will seek to seize the press; 4) they will use any pretext, since in the Romanian people there are dissensions, misunderstandings, and quarrels, to divide them into as many antagonistic parties as possible; 5) they will seek to monopolise more and more the means of existence of Romanians; 6) they will systematically drive them to dissoluteness, annihilating family and moral force without forgetting to degrade and daze them through alcoholic drinks and other poisons. And, in truth, anyone who would want to kill and conquer a race could do it by adopting this system.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

Life, God, People, Alcohol

“Capital, explaining the origins of the capitalist mode of production, points towards the inevitable historical decline and fall of this same social system. An economic theory based upon the historical relativity of every economic system, its strict limitation in time, tactlessly reminds Messrs the capitalists, their hangers-on and their apologists that capitalism itself is a product of history. It will perish in due course as it once was born. A new social form of economic organization will then take the place of the capitalist one: it will function according to other laws than those which govern the capitalist economy.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Law, History, Time

“There is an honesty in science which demands that the best means be used for the determination of truth. Certainly there are many sorts of truth in the universe, and many aspects of truth must be taken into account if man is to live most effectively in the social organization to which he belongs. But in regard to matter---the stuff of which both non-living materials and living organisms are made---scientists believe that there is no better way of obtaining information than that provided by human sense organs. No theory, no philosophy, no body of theology, no political expediency, no wishful thinking, can provide a satisfactory substitute for the observation of material objects and of the way in which they behave.”

Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) American scientist (1894–1956)

page 9
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)

Truth, Way, Thinking, Sense

“The worst censors are those prohibiting criticism of the theory of evolution in the classroom.”

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) American activist

Time to End the Censorship, Phyllis Schlafly Columns, 2007-03-30, Schlafly, Phyllis, 2004-12-29 http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2004/dec04/04-12-29.html,

“Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3, “Words Scientists Don’t Use: At Least Not the Way You Do” (p. 56)

Personality

“I was evidence of the theory that books are made out of other books... But I did not remain so for long, nor do I believe any potential writer could.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Books

“It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Source: Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), P. 5.

Dogs, Sense, Animals, Baby

“The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

Behavior, Game, Change, Parting

“It is significant that Communist theory treats the proletariat as though it were a unique branch of the human race. The proletariat is assumed to be a special breed which would almost automatically blossom into pleasant, efficient social-economic living if it could just be liberated from oppressive government. The government is presumed to be nothing more than the tool of an oppressive class of capitalists and consequently, if the capitalist class were destroyed, the need for any kind of government would be obliterated. The Communist leaders have always felt confident that when the proletariat takes over it will not want to oppress anyone and therefore the need for government will be nonexistent.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Confidence

“Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such “transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. xliii

Light, Universe

“I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy and power of the fascist cohorts.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

As Quoted in The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, Arthur Versluis, Oxford University Press (2006) p. 39.
Undated

“Functionalist systems theories. The theorists in this tradition explain the emergence and/or maintenance of parts, structures, institutions, norms or cultural patterns of a social system in terms of their consequences, that is, the particular functions each realizes or satisfies. This includes, for instance, their contribution to the maintenance and reproduction over time of the larger system. The major functionalist in sociology is arguably Talcott Parsons.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Time, Parting

“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)

Strong

“CONSIDERABLE attention has recently been devoted to understanding behavior in large organizational systems. Although some of this work has been based on research, it has more typically been general theorizing with little support from research data. Our interest in examining complex organizations is to study more systematically and empirically their internal functioning in relation to the demands of the external environment on the organization and the ability of the organization to cope effectively with these demands, contributing to a theory of the functioning of large organizations based on empirical research.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: "Differentiation and integration in complex organizations," 1967, p. 2

Behavior, Understanding, Support, Study

“But one of the great disappointments of esoteric practice is that discovering reality is your own creation does not give you the power to change it permanently. However much physics you read, however many mystical writings you study, the world remains stubbornly solid. In theory, you should be able to build your next home by thinking it into existence. In practice, you still have to lay the bricks like anybody else.”

Herbie Brennan (1940) Irish Author

Source: Magical Use of Thought Forms (2001), p. 34

World, Disappointment, Home, Thinking

“Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology above the other sciences in the attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing explanation of nature or reality.”

Robert Lanza (1956) American medical doctor

A New Theory of the Universe:Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation, Spring, 2007, The American Scholar http://www.theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/,

Life, World, Way, Nature

“In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy…”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Book abstract.
New Directions for Organization Theory, 1997

World, Way, History, Literature

“It may be true that only those minds which are habituated to think logically can safely trust their intuitive conclusions, on the theory that the subconscious level will do its kind of work as faithfully as the conscious does its kind.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 9.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Thinking

“Bereft of much of its mummery, Marxist theory reveals itself as a variant of generic fascism. The contest of the twentieth century, which has cost so much in human lives, was not between the Right and the Left. It was between representative democracies and their anti-democratic opponents”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. x

Democracy

“Probability is too important to be left to the experts. […] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. […] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Source: The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers (1991), p. 4 [emphasis in original]

World, Reality, Training

“The reviewer is aware… he has given an imperfect account of this remarkable book. That Klein's researches constitute a splendid advance in dynamics of the rotation of a rigid body there can be no question. One cannot but hope that the outline given in these Princeton lectures may soon be expanded and put in shape more easily assimilated by persons more moderately versed in the theory of elliptic functions.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

Books, Hope, Question, Personality

“The Bible was regarded as not only true, but as the best of all truth. Any new theory advanced, was immediately examined in the light, or rather in the darkness, of revelation, and if according to that test it was false, it was denounced, and the person bringing it forward forced to recant. It would have been a far better course to have discovered every theory found to be in harmony with the Scriptures.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Truth, Light, Personality, Falseness

“By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; that in the future it may be different; and that, consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the work of our eyes and hands—and also of our words—there might have been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely and extraordinarily new—auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences, and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment, differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other matter with totally different properties. …We must, by setting aside the mechanical theory, free ourselves from a too narrow conception of the constitution of matter. And this liberation will be to us a great advantage which we shall soon reap. We shall avoid the error of believing that mechanics is the only real thing and that all that cannot be explained by mechanics must be incomprehensible. We shall then gain more liberty of mind for understanding what the union of the soul with the body may be.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 43

Error, Soul, History, Idea

“Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1009

Fools, Sense, Time

“When the classical worldview was applied to social science, the dominant notions turned out to be struggle for survival, the profit of the individual, with at best an assumed automatic coincidence of individual and societal good (through Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). When the systemic vision inspires the theories of social science, the values of competition are mitigated by those of cooperation, and the emphasis on individualistic work ethos is tempered with a tolerance of diversity and of experimentation with institutions and practices that foster man-man and man- nature adaptation and harmony.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 12.

Nature, Science

“Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Life, Hope, Science, Change

“A certain theory of representation implies a certain theory of meaning - and meaning is what we live by.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Source: Complexity and Postmodernism (1998), p. 88; as cited by David Byrne (1999)

“Hayek’s view was that all the knowledge that is possible of a circumstance is a theory of the circumstance—that is, there is no such thing as pure sensation. There is, rather, a theory of sensation.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Knowledge

“However, you will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will. It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not, then you do not change reality one iota.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 393, Page 180
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 8

Reality, Change

“Thus, there are two points to remember. First, our friends are not just Marxists, they are also Macaulayites. Second, they are Marxists in a special sense. They are Marxists in the sense that they have thought of themselves as Marxists, in the sense that they repeatedly regurgitate a handful of Marxist phrases and assertions. But more than being Marxist historians, they have been establishment historians. Their theories and ‘theses’ have accorded not just with the ‘classics’ of Marxism-Leninism, they have accorded with the ideology of, which in terms of their theory means, the needs of Congressite rulers.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Sense

“Damn, but science is just a constant feed of cool new facts and theories. Theology doesn’t come close.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" A huge water geyser on Saturn’s moon helps make the rings, and a bonus eclipse from Mars http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/a-huge-water-geyser-on-saturns-moon-helps-make-the-rings-and-a-bonus-eclipse-from-mars/" September 17, 2012

Science

“An explanation of a phenomenon is regarded, apparently instinctively, as the most general possible when it is a mechanical explanation. The "mechanism" of the process is the ultimate goal of experiment. Now this mechanism in general lies beyond the range of the senses; either by reason of their limitations, as in the case of the atomic structure of matter, or by the very nature of the supposed mechanism, as in the theory of the ether. The only way to bridge the gap between the machinery of the physical process and the world of sense-impressions is to think out some consequence of that mechanism. This we will call the hypothesis. The hypothesis, resting still on the mechanical basis, is yet beyond the range of direct experimental investigation; but if, by mathematical reasoning, a consequence of the hypothesis can be deduced, this will often lie within the range of experimental inquiry, and thus a test of the soundness of the original mechanical conception may be instituted.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Lie, World, Way, Mathematics

“As an instance of the remarkably far-reaching effect which a single mathematico-physical concept has had upon the development of chemical theory, one has but to recall the state of chemistry just before the revival of Avogadro's law by Cannizzaro, to be impressed by its confusion.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)
Context: As an instance of the remarkably far-reaching effect which a single mathematico-physical concept has had upon the development of chemical theory, one has but to recall the state of chemistry just before the revival of Avogadro's law by Cannizzaro, to be impressed by its confusion. Relying solely upon their "chemical instinct," the leaders of the various schools of chemical thought had developed each his own theoretical system.... a host of... conceptions strove for supremacy. The strife was stilled, order and unity were restored, as soon as Avogadro's great idea was seen in its true light, and the concept of the molecule was introduced into chemistry. A formula which had required pages of reasoning from a purely chemical standpoint to establish, and that insecurely, was fixed by a single numerical result.

Law

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

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

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life, People, Truth, World

“Aesthetic theories arose one hundred fifty years ago among the wealthy classes of the Christian European world. …And notwithstanding its obvious insolidity, nobody else's theory so pleased the cultured crowd or was accepted so readily and with such absence of criticism. It so suited the people of the upper classes that to this day, notwithstanding its entirely fantastic character and the arbitrary nature of its assertions, it is repeated by the educated and uneducated as though it were something indubitable and self-evident.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

People, World, Education, Nature

““Knowledge is power.” This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. … This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates, was an erotic theory—the love of truth and the truth through love (Liebeswahrheit). … Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. xxvii

Love, Truth, Game, Knowledge

“Myrdalian ex ante language would have saved the General Theory from describing the flow of investment and the flow of saving as identically, tautologically equal, and within the same discourse, treating their equality as a condition which may, or not, be fulfilled”

G. L. S. Shackle (1903–1992) British economist

G. L. S. Shackle (1989) "What did the General Theory do?", in J. Pheby (ed), New Directions in Post-keynesian Economics, Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

“The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.”

M. H. Abrams (1912–2015) American literary theorist

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

“A scientific theory is a concise and coherent set of concepts, claims, and laws (frequently expressed mathematically) that can be used to precisely and accurately explain and predict natural phenomena.
A theory should include a mechanism that explains how its concepts, claims, and laws arise from lower-level theories.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 2, “Just a Theory: What Scientists Do” (p. 24)

Law, Mathematics, Nature

“Wilson's analytical theory assumed that the natural and inevitable tendency in any system of government is to have recourse to some sovereign body that will exercise "ultimate supremacy" and have the last say in making collective decisions. It is in this sense that we speak of a government as have a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of authority and use of force in society. Indeed, much of contemporary political science is based on this presumption.”

Vincent Ostrom (1919–2012) American academic, educator and political scientist

Vincent Ostrom (2008), The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, p. 87; Cited in: " Vincent Ostrom on Woodrow Wilson and Political Monism http://discoursesonliberty.blogspot.nl/2012/04/vincent-ostrom-on-woodrow-wilson-and.html" at discoursesonliberty.blogspot.nl, 2012/04

Exercises, Nature, Decision, Sense

“The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger…. The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific "fact," since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or "guess."… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a "myth."”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) (dissenting) http://www.belcherfoundation.org/edwards_v_aguillard_dissent.htm <br class="br">Has been misleadingly quoted without Scalia's statements attributing the assertions to witness testimony paragraphs earlier, "Before summarizing the testimony of Senator Keith and his supporters, I wish to make clear that I by no means intend to endorse its accuracy... Senator Keith and his witnesses testified essentially as set forth in the following numbered paragraphs:", as in Michael Stone, " Scalia Commencement Speech Supports Young Earth Creationism http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2015/06/scalia-commencement-speech-supports-young-earth-creationism/" (), Progressive Secular Humanist, Patheos. <br class="br">Misattributed

Support, Problem, Strong, Science

“There [is]… a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:
1. Economic theory should unify economic science. - The task of a general body of theory in any subject is to give unity to its investigations…
2. Economic theory should be relevant to the modern problem of control. - Students of economics should spend their efforts upon subjects worth investigation…
3. The proper subject-matter of economic theory is institutions. - The demand that economic theory relate to institutions is implicit in the plea for its relevancy…
4. Economic theory is concerned with matters of process. - If economic theory is to treat of institutions it must know both the kinds of things institutions are and the kinds of things they are not…
5. Economic theory must be based upon an acceptable theory of human behavior.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

After all control and institutions and processes are immediate things. They can all be translated into terms of human conduct...
Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311-6

Behavior, Problem, Effort, Science

“No style can have absolute significance in art theory; each one is rooted in its own time and locality and bound by conditions above which it is incapable of elevating itself no matter how great the content it carries.”

Hermann Laroche

Quoted in Vladimir Barsky, Chromaticism (1996, ISBN 371865704X)

Art, Time

“We have to work sincerely and responsibly to thwart any attempt to divide the Arab nation into small groups, with which foreign countries would deal separately. This would eventually be in the interests of Zionism, which stands behind such policies, formulating the relevant theories and promoting distorted information to world politicians, especially in the West, in order to make them adopt an approach which is harmful to the Arab nation and is even against the legitimate interests of their own countries.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

President Saddam Hussein's Speech on National Day (1981)

World, Sincerity, Country

“A new scientific theory is seldom stated with such clarity by its original author, and usually takes many years to creep into public conciousness.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

[John M. Ziman, The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific Dimension of Society, Cambridge University Press, 1976, 0-521-09917-X, 98]

“It may fairly be said that the germs of the modern algebra of linear substitutions and concomitants are to be found in the fifth section of the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae; and inversely, every advance in the algebraic theory of forms is an acquisition to the arithmetical theory.”

George Ballard Mathews (1861–1922) British mathematician

Part 1, sect. 48.
Theory of Numbers, 1892

“It is in scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life and man in the science classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.”

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) German, later an American, aerospace engineer and space architect

From a letter to the California State board of Education (14 September 1972)

Life, Error, Universe, Science

“If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Life, Nature, Knowledge, Learning

“How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)?… the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness… really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.”

Erwin Schrödinger book What Is Life?

What Is Life? (1944)

Death

“The concept of leadership has an ambiguous status in organizational practice, as it does in organizational theory. In practice, management appears to be of two minds about the exercise of leadership. Many jobs are so specified in content and method that within very broad limits differences among individuals become irrelevant, and acts of leadership are regarded as gratuitous at best, and at worst insubordinate”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 300

Exercises, Appearance

“According to Dr. Ambedkar, Kapila is the source of one of Buddhism's most fundamental concepts, causality, and also of the related Buddhist rejection of the belief in a personal Creator of the universe: 'His next tenet related to causality-creation and its cause. Kapila denied the theory that there was a being who created the universe.”

Kapila Vedic sage, of the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy

Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743, with quote from Ambedkar: The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1:5:2.

Universe, Personality

“The need for a fundamentally different approach to the study of physical processes at the molecular level motivated the development of relevant statistical methods, which turned out to be applicable not only to the study of molecular processes (statistical mechanics), but to a host of other areas such as the actuarial profession, design of large telephone exchanges, and the like. In statistical methods, specific manifestations of microscopic entities (molecules, individual telephone sites, etc.) are replaced with their statistical averages, which are connected with appropriate macroscopic variables. The role played in Newtonian mechanics by the calculus, which involves no uncertainty, is replaced in statistical mechanics by probability theory, a theory whose very purpose is to capture uncertainty of a certain type.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 1-2.

Motivation, Study

“Surely, after 62 years, we should have an exact formulation of some serious part of quantum mechanics? By 'exact' I do not of course mean 'exactly true'. I mean only that the theory should be fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist… until workable approximations are needed in applications. By 'serious' I mean that some substantial fragment of physics should be covered. Nonrelativistic 'particle' quantum mechanics, perhaps with the inclusion of the electromagnetic field and a cut-off interaction, is serious enough.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)

Mathematics, Parting

“The enterprise engineer must be a leader, a designer, and a synthesizer. He is a doer. He understands theory as a guide to practice. He must concern himself with human organization because the pace and success of technology are becoming more dependent on interaction with the social system and less on scientific discovery. In private as well as public research and development, such men must find ways to reverse the deterioration of ethics and efficiency. They will strengthen the information links between physical design and the public so that technology can better serve society. In the public sector they must show the level of wisdom and leadership that can co-ordinate great engineering projects with politics. They will recognise that informing the public and becoming a nucleus for crystallising public opinion is even more important in many programmes than is the underlying science.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Engineering Education and Engineering Practice in the Year 2000 (1967), p. 137

Wisdom, Men, Way, Understanding

“A true scholarship would examine, and then either accept or reject, with good reason, any new theory which challenges a generally accepted theory admitted to be full of sharp anomalies. However, this has not been the attitude of world scholarship towards our earlier book. The general attitude has been as follows: there is a school of crank scholarship in India which is out to prove, by hook or by crook, that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages; and the writers of this school deserve to be firmly put in their place. And the best method of doing this is by tarring all scholars who support, or even appear to support, an Indian homeland theory, with one brush; and then pointing out particularly untenable propositions made by one or the other of the scholars so branded together, to prove that all the scholars so named belong to one single school of irrational scholarship.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Shrikant Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, 2000.
The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 9 : Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship

Books, World, School, Family

“The brainwashing which has been going on for 150 years has also resulted in the replacement of intellectual activities and religion by ideologies and science. …I have nothing against Marx, except that his theories do not explain what happened.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Religion, Science

““I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.”
I considered this. “I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.””

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

People, Family, Thinking, Personality

“The notion of conditional probability is a basic tool of probability theory, and it is unfortunate that its great simplicity is somewhat obscured by a singularly clumsy terminology.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter V, Conditional Probability, Stochastic Independence, p. 114.

“Under capitalism, subjectivity can only exist antagonistically, in opposition to its own objectification. To treat the subject as already emancipated, as most mainstream theory does, is to endorse the present objectification of the subject as subjectivity, as freedom.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

Freedom

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair… This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

LBJ in the Commencement Address at Howard University http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/sources/ps_bakke.html on June 4, 1965 on affirmative action. <br class="br">1960s

Freedom

“And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer, he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all the theories and all the philosophies. Other peoples have left chiefly institutions, books; we have left souls; St. Teresa is worth any institution, any Critique of Pure Reason.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

People, Books, Soul

“If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable exploration of the criteria for determining what abstract model it is best to use for particular kinds of problems, what entities in the abstract model are to be identified with what observable entities, and what features of the problem or of the circumstances have the greatest effect on the accuracy of the predictions yielded by a particular model or theory.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

"The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953)

Problem

“The main importance of Francis Bacon’s influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

1920s, The Aims of Education (1929)

Lie

“Some of the effects predicted by the theory [of loop quantum gravity] appear to be in conflict with one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity… that the speed of light is a universal constant. …Photons of higher energy travel slightly slower than low-energy photons. …the principle of [general] relativity is preserved but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification. …A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without violating the principle of [general] relativity!”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Travel, Light, Universe, Appearance

“Altruism itself was so insisted upon in the latter half of the nineteenth century that … theory and practice, words and deeds, stood in liveliest contradiction. … Everywhere a conflict rent the world in twain: it created abysses in every thinker’s scheme of things: it made its presence so unpleasantly real that the best brains gave up research and thinking, and crept for refuge into a profession, a craft, into libraries, or hid themselves in the mine-shafts of specialism.”

Oscar Levy (1867–1946) German physician and writer

Source: The Revival of Aristocracy (1906), p. 37.

World, Thinking

“I am also, I must confess, a little sceptical of the theory that we have a right, if we could, to pass on our capital burden to future generations. I remarked last year in this context that our predecessors had not passed any significant part of their burden on to us.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 29, 1963, page 134.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Future, Parting

“The ultimate most holy form of theory is action.
Not to look on passively while the spark leaps from generation to generation, but to leap and to burn with it!”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

“I'm an excuse for medical experiments and art theory. You must get me out of here and out of the hospital.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

A Zed and Two Noughts

Art

“Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.”

Joseph McCabe (1867–1955) British writer

The Human Origin of Morals http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mccabe02.htm (1926), p. 59.

Age, Light, Past

“Magnets humiliate iron. It's a theory about love.”

Marco Denevi book Falsificaciones

El imán humilla al hierro. Es una teoría sobre el amor.
Falsificaciones (1977)

Love

“The description of the evolutionary trajectory of dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear fits certain features of the historical development of human societies. But the description of evolutionary processes, whether in nature or in history, has additional elements. These elements include such factors as the convergence of existing systems on progressively higher organizational levels, the increasingly efficient exploitation by systems of the sources of free energy in their environment, and the complexification of systems structure in states progressively further removed from thermodynamic equilibrium.
General evolution theory, based on the integration of the relevant tenets of general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, can convey a sound understanding of the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems in the various realms of investigation…. The basic notions of this new discipline can be developed to give an adequate account of the dynamical evolution of human societies as well. Such an account could furnish the basis of a system of knowledge better able to orient human beings and societies in their rapidly changing milieu.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

E. Laszlo et al. (1993) pp. xvii- xix; as cited in: Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Law, History, Communication, Understanding

“In the artist/theorist tradition of Robert Smithson, Joseph Nechvatal is a pioneer in the field of digital image making who challenges our perceptions of nature by altering conventional notions of space and time, gender, and self… Nechvatal successfully plunged into the depths where art, technology and theory meet.”

Joe Lewis (artist) (1953) American photographer

"Joseph Nechvatal at Universal Concepts Unlimited," in: Art in America Magazine, March 2003. pp.123-124.

Art, Nature, Time

“Talking about the particles, I know I don't have any special theory of particles. It's just the way it came out and that's the way I want to do it. Also, there are advantages to particles: you can't break them; they don't break apart. They don’t have any rigid connections; there are no rigid connections to break. The particles are always shifting around a little bit and you have to kick them back into shape. It's like tuning a piano every once in a while. I like the idea of something being permanent by being non-rigid, being absolutely non-rigid but not having a rigid form that can be broken. But a theory of particles, I don’t know. Maybe late one night after a few drinks I explained to Lucy Lippard a theory of particles. I'm sure I didn't remember the next day.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 30

Way, Idea, Drink, Night

“I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

2012
December
All Eyez on Him
Michael
Hainey
GQ
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201212/marco-rubio-interview-gq-december-2012?currentPage=2
Posed question: How old do you think the Earth is?
2010s, 2012

People, Age, Faith, History

“Formal theories of organization have been taught in management courses for many years, and there is an extensive literature on the subject. The textbook principles of organization — hierarchical structure, authority, unity of command, task specialization, division of staff and line, span of control, equality of responsibility and authority, etc. — comprise a logically persuasive set of assumptions which have had a profound influence upon managerial behavior.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 15 (p. 21 in 2006 edition)

Behavior, Literature

“In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants. Thus, one might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis. But in actual fact, classical economic theory did manage to sidestep the game-theoretic aspects of economic behavior by postulating perfect competition, i. e., by assuming that every buyer and every seller is very small as compared with the size of the relevant markets, so that nobody can significantly affect the existing market prices by his actions.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior, Game, Understanding, Perfection