Quotes about thesis

A collection of quotes on the topic of thesis, book, booking, other.

Quotes about thesis

George Soros photo
Lev Mekhlis photo

“War is an equation with many unknowns; and this already refutes the thesis of invincibility. History does not know invincible armies.”

Lev Mekhlis (1889–1953) Soviet politician

The wars of the past show us that even armies that had won brilliant victories for decades, in some cases were not only defeated but even disintegrated and ceased to exist. Such a fate, for example, befell the army of Napoleon, who for almost two decades kept the whole Europe under its boots. The army needs to instill a spirit of confidence in its power, but not in terms of boasting. Bragging about invincibility brings harm to the army.
Speech to Red Army personnel, 13 May 1940
Source: http://porto-fr.odessa.ua/index.php?art_num=art021&year=2008&nnumb=40

John Nash photo
Theodor W. Adorno photo

“The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. … Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 20

Otto Neurath photo

“Quite a few political economists advocate the thesis that a Robinson Crusoe — or what amounts to the same thing, a controlled economy — calculates in terms of profits and losses.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Otto Neurath (1935) "What is Meant by a Rational Economic Theory?" 1935/1987, p. 95; as cited in Cat (2014)
1930s

Juan Donoso Cortés photo
Theodor W. Adorno photo

“Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 7

Nelson Mandela photo

“He seeks an economic order, alternative to the capitalist and communist, and finds this in sarvodaya based on nonviolence (ahimsa).
He rejects Darwin's survival of the fittest, Adam Smith's laissez-faire and Karl Marx's thesis of a natural antagonism between capital and labor, and focuses on the interdependence between the two.
He believes in the human capacity to change and wages Satyagraha against the oppressor, not to destroy him but to transform him, that he cease his oppression and join the oppressed in the pursuit of Truth.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, The Sacred Warrior (2000)
Context: He stepped down from his comfortable life to join the masses on their level to seek equality with them. "I can't hope to bring about economic equality... I have to reduce myself to the level of the poorest of the poor."
From his understanding of wealth and poverty came his understanding of labor and capital, which led him to the solution of trusteeship based on the belief that there is no private ownership of capital; it is given in trust for redistribution and equalization. Similarly, while recognizing differential aptitudes and talents, he holds that these are gifts from God to be used for the collective good.
He seeks an economic order, alternative to the capitalist and communist, and finds this in sarvodaya based on nonviolence (ahimsa).
He rejects Darwin's survival of the fittest, Adam Smith's laissez-faire and Karl Marx's thesis of a natural antagonism between capital and labor, and focuses on the interdependence between the two.
He believes in the human capacity to change and wages Satyagraha against the oppressor, not to destroy him but to transform him, that he cease his oppression and join the oppressed in the pursuit of Truth.
We in South Africa brought about our new democracy relatively peacefully on the foundations of such thinking, regardless of whether we were directly influenced by Gandhi or not.

Bernhard Riemann photo

“II. Thesis. In order that decision by arbitrary power may be possible in spite of completely definite laws of the action of ideas, one must assume that the psychic mechanism itself has, or at least in its development acquires, the peculiar property of inducing the necessity of these laws. Antithesis.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

No one can, in case of affairs, abandon the conviction that the future is co-determined by his transactions.
Antimonies
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1836
1820s, Journals (1822–1863)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo
Albert O. Hirschman photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz photo
Norman Mailer photo
Alfred Korzybski photo
Samuel P. Huntington photo
Adam Schaff photo
Michael Shermer photo

“My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.”

[Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Share, Gossip, and Follow the Golden Rule, 1st edition, 2004, Times Books, New York, ISBN 0805075208, 18]

Bernhard Riemann photo

“II. Thesis. Freedom, i. e., not the power absolutely to originate, but to pass judgement between two or more possibilities. Antithesis.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Determinism.
Antimonies
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Ulrich Duchrow photo

“Western civilisation, with its own spirituality, has permeated all corners of the earth. My thesis is that this is the spirituality of money.”

Ulrich Duchrow (1935) German theologian

"Spirituality for democracy and social cohesion versus the spirituality of money," Verbum et Ecclesia 35(3) http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v35i3.1332

“The Book [of Judges] as a whole gives a coherent picture of an era and propounds the thesis that the institutions of pre-monarchic Israel were so chaotic… that centralized, hereditary kingship was necessary.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

Adam Schaff photo
William A. Dembski photo

“My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

Source: 1990s, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999), p. 206

Sergey Lavrov photo
Gancho Tsenov photo
Mwai Kibaki photo
Alain Badiou photo

“If the establishment of the thesis 'mathematics is ontology' is the basis of this book, it is in no way its goal.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Introduction
Being and Event (1988)

Jacques Ellul photo
Kenneth E. Iverson photo
Hans Reichenbach photo

“The main objection to the theory of pure visualization is our thesis that the non-Euclidean axioms can be visualized just as rigorously if we adjust the concept of congruence. This thesis is based on the discovery that the normative function of visualization is not of visual but of logical origin and that the intuitive acceptance of certain axioms is based on conditions from which they follow logically, and which have previously been smuggled into the images. The axiom that the straight line is the shortest distance is highly intuitive only because we have adapted the concept of straightness to the system of Eucidean concepts. It is therefore necessary merely to change these conditions to gain a correspondingly intuitive and clear insight into different sets of axioms; this recognition strikes at the root of the intuitive priority of Euclidean geometry. Our solution of the problem is a denial of pure visualization, inasmuch as it denies to visualization a special extralogical compulsion and points out the purely logical and nonintuitive origin of the normative function. Since it asserts, however, the possibility of a visual representation of all geometries, it could be understood as an extension of pure visualization to all geometries. In that case the predicate "pure" is but an empty addition, since it denotes only the difference between experienced and imagined pictures, and we shall therefore discard the term "pure visualization."”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

Instead we shall speak of the normative function of the thinking process, which can guide the pictorial elements of thinking into any logically permissible structure.
The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Tim Buck photo
Chuck Klosterman photo
Bart D. Ehrman photo
Albert Camus photo

“Great novelists are philosopher novelists — that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.”

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning

Philip Warren Anderson photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Rosa Luxemburg photo
Bernhard Riemann photo

“III. Thesis. A God working in Time. (Government of the world). Antithesis. A timeless, personal, omniscient, al-mighty, all-benevolent God”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Providence
Antimonies
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Rousas John Rushdoony photo

“Now one of the interesting facts here with respect to intermarriage, and our time is just about up and we will conclude in a moment, is this; that historically, whenever you have had two peoples close together, and one in a position of power and the other in a position of either slavery or inferiority, it takes only a very short time for the two races to merge, no matter how great the hatred between them. Thus, when the Normans took England, there was nothing more hateful to the Anglo Saxon peoples of England than a Norman. And yet, because they were of comparable ability, in spite of that intense hatred, they did merge, ultimately. But when you find two peoples of very different intellectual and cultural levels close together, they can be together generation after generation, and the amount of merging is very slight. So that there is no disappearing of one as against the other. This is why the Negro did not disappear in the South. Had the slaves been, say of another racial group, it would not have taken more than a hundred years of slavery for the two groups to have merged. But you had a couple of hundred years of slavery in the south, and the Negro did not disappear. So this is the remarkable fact. As a result, when you hear stories told about how the Negro women were exploited and so on, these stories tend to be exaggerations. As a matter of fact, the truth was usually the other way, it was very difficult to raise children in the south, or to rear children in the south, because one way of promotion was to capture the interest of a white boy or a white man. Now this goes counter to the Marxist thesis, but when you study the history of the west you discover that one of the best things that ever happened incidentally to the morality of the upper classes was modern inventions which abolished the need for servants in the home. Because one of the major problems that existed was the seduction of the boys and the men in a household by servant girls.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Rex Stout photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Conrad Black photo
Norbert Wiener photo

“Sraffa’s criticisms of the concept of capital also amount – at least in principle –to a deadly blow to the foundations of the so-called ‘neo-classical synthesis’. Combining Keynes’ thesis on the possibility of fighting unemployment by adopting adequate fiscal and monetary policies with the marginalist tradition of simultaneous determination of equilibrium quantities and prices as a method to study any economic problem, this approach has in the last few decades come to constitute the dominant doctrine in textbooks the whole world over. It is only thanks to increasing specialisation in the various fields of economics, often invoked as the inevitable response to otherwise insoluble difficulties, that the theoreticians of general equilibrium are able to construct their models without considering the problem of relations with the real world that economists are supposed to be interpreting, and that the macroeconomists can pretend that their ‘one commodity models’ constitute an acceptable tool for analysis. For those who believe that the true task facing economists, hard as it may be, is to seek to interpret the world they live in, Sraffa’s ‘cultural revolution’ still marks out a path for research that may not (as yet) have yielded all it was hoped to, but is certainly worth pursuing.”

Alessandro Roncaglia (1947) Italian economist

Source: Piero Sraffa: His life, thought and cultural heritage (2000), Ch. 1. Piero Sraffa

Karl Popper photo
Raymond Chandler photo
Bernard Lewis photo

“WELT: Has anyone ever been able to invalidate your thesis that Europe will be Islamic at the end of the century?
Lewis: One argument would be that Muslims would soon adopt the demographic pattern of Europe. But I said anyway, provided the current trends of immigration and demography remain, then Europe will become Islamic. To be sure, there has been no major change in these trends.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article211310/Europa-wird-islamisch.html
WELT: Hat bisher jemand Ihre These, wonach Europa am Ende des Jahrhunderts islamisch sein werde, entkräften können?
Lewis: Ein Argument wäre, daß Moslems bald das demographische Muster Europas übernehmen. Aber ich sagte ohnehin, sofern die aktuellen Trends der Immigration und Demographie bleiben, dann wird Europa islamisch werden. Freilich gab es bislang keine große Änderung in diesen Trends.
Interviews

Alain de Botton photo

“He was reminded of a Dutch book whose moral he often returned to: De Schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen in het Hollandse landschap, written by a couple of academics in Rotterdam University, Anne Kieke Backer and Arij de Boode. The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape was a defence of the contribution of transmission engineering to the visual appeal of Holland, referencing the often ignored grandeur of the towers on their march from power stations to cities. Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasised that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. The re-evaluation of the windmills had in large part been the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who, moved by their country’s dependence on the rotating utilitarian objects, gave them pride of place in their canvases, taking care to throw their finest aspect into relief, like their resilience during storms and the glint of their sails in the late afternoon sun. … It would perhaps be left to artists of our own day to teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 212.

“My first thesis is that identity is unitary.”

Colin McGinn (1950) British philosopher

Logical Properties (2000), 1. Identity

Colette Dowling photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
Bernhard Riemann photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Bernhard Riemann photo

“Thesis. Finite, Representable. Antithesis. Infinite, System of Notions lying at the limit of the representable.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Antimonies
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Perry Anderson photo
Jerry Fodor photo

“I have no thesis except that people get a very raw deal from life.”

James Gould Cozzens (1903–1978) American novelist

in "The Hermit of Lambertville", 2 September 1957, TIME Magazine

Paul Kurtz photo
Norbert Wiener photo

“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.”

Source: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 26-27 as cited in: Felix Geyer, Johannes van der Zouwen, (1994) " Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/chaos/024Weiner.htm", Kybernetes, Vol. 23 Iss: 6/7, pp.46 - 61

Peter Sloterdijk photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Alain Badiou photo

“Everything turns on mastering the gap between the presupposition (that must be rejected) of a being of the one and the thesis of its 'there is.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Meditation One: The One and the Multiple: a priori conditions of any possible ontology
Being and Event (1988)

Reinhard Selten photo

“The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class.”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Tragedy of the Commons ( read on-line http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full), 1968.
Tragedy of the Commons (1968)

Slavoj Žižek photo
Alain Badiou photo

“The initial thesis of my enterprise - on the basis of which this entanglement of periodizations is organized by extracting the sense of each - is this following: the science of being qua being has existed since the Greeks - such is the sense and status of mathematics. However, it is only today that we have the means to know this. It follows from this thesis that philosophy is not centered on on ontology - which exists as a separate and exact discipline- rather it circulates between this ontology (this, mathematics), the modern theories of he subject and its own history. The contemporary complex of the conditions of philosophy includes everything referred to in my first three statements: the history of 'Western'thought, post-Cantorian mathematics, psychoanalysis, contemporary art and politics. Philosophy does not coincide with any of these conditions; nor does it map out the totality to which they belong. What philosophy must do is purpose a conceptual framework in which the contemporary compossibilty of these conditions can be grasped. Philosophy can only do this - and this is what frees it from any foundational ambition, in which it would lose itself- by designating amongst its own conditions, as a singular discursive situation, ontology itself in the form of pure mathematics. This is precisely what delivers philosophy and ordains it to the care of truths.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Introduction
Being and Event (1988)

Barry Eichengreen photo
James K. Morrow photo

“Quality education and thesis should be the yardstick in gauging the standing of the university.”

Yao Leeh-ter (1962) Taiwanese educator and politician

Yao Leeh-ter (2018) cited in " Quality education in Taiwan should be the top choice for Malaysians: Yao Leeh-ter http://annx.asianews.network/content/quality-education-taiwan-should-be-top-choice-malaysians-yao-leeh-ter-78220" on Asia News Network, 2 August 2018

Stuart Kauffman photo

“One of the most important presuppositions of Darwin's entire thesis is gradualism, the idea that mutations to the genome can cause minor variations in the organism's properties, which can be accumulated piecemeal, bit by bit, over the eons to create the complex order found in the organisms we observe.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Source: At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1996), p.151. as cited in: A. Kay (2006) The Dynamics of Public Policy: Theory and Evidence. p.43

Ernest Mandel photo

“Yes, he does indeed and again this is very positive. Our movement has defended this thesis for 55 years and was therefore labelled as counterrevolutionary. Today people, both in the Soviet Union and in a large part of the international communist movement, understand better where the real counterrevolutionaries were.”

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

Mandel answering the question Is it not true that Mikhail Gorbachev stated that Perestroika is a true new revolution? in an interview in New Times, no. 38/1990, French edition. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism?, pp. 56.

Koenraad Elst photo
Aron Ra photo

“So, Kent Hovind gets out of prison and every atheist wants a piece of him. I understand that; I hate liars, I hate anyone who deceives even little old ladies and especially other people's children. So, of course I'd love to have the opportunity to get into it with Mister (not Doctor) Kent Hovind, as would every other atheist activist with a passion for science and a concern for truth. Understand though that this charlatan is every kind of fraud. He just wants to reestablish his racket. His schtick is to pretend to be more important than he is; we all know that his thesis was just as bogus as the PHD that he bought from a mail order catalog for about $100, he also claims to have taught high school science for about 15 years, hoping that folks will think that he has some verifiable connection to a high school somewhere (an actual school), but what I suspect is really the case is he may have preached to homeschooled kids at his house (which he used as a church sometimes). I can understand Atheist Podcast wanting to have this guy on to take him to task, but remember, he is a conman, a professional fraud. In his mind, he gains merit and financial supporters as a result of being "oppressed in the face of adversity", so go ahead and have him on, but only as a sideshow freak, someone to gawk at; show him the contempt he deserves. Don't treat him like an opponent, as if he had something to bring to the table.”

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

Youtube, Other, Debating Dr Dunno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKw8K7o-vwY (August 4, 2015)

Thomas Piketty photo

“The right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling.”

Thomas Piketty (1971) French economist

Paul Krugman " The Piketty Panic http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/krugman-the-piketty-panic.html" in nytimes.com, 2014/04/25; cited in: " Six Ways Thomas Piketty's 'Capital' Isn't Holding Up to Scrutiny http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2014/05/01/six-ways-thomas-pikettys-capital-isnt-holding-up-to-scrutiny/" by Kyle Smith at forbes.com, 2014/04/25.
About

Hermann Hesse photo

“For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis. In general, aside from certain brilliant exceptions, Games with discordant, negative, or skeptical conclusions were unpopular and at times actually forbidden. This followed directly from the meaning the Game had acquired at its height for the players. It represented an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one within itself — in other words, to God. Pious thinkers of earlier times had represented the life of creatures, say, as a mode of motion toward God, and had considered that the variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Similarly, the symbols and formulas of the Glass Bead Game combined structurally, musically, and philosophically within the framework of a universal language, were nourished by all the sciences and arts, and strove in play to achieve perfection, pure being, the fullness of reality. ”

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Harsha of Kashmir photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
George Holmes Howison photo