Theory Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Isaac Asimov

Nicolaus Copernicus

John Polkinghorne

Thomas Kuhn

William Whewell

Max Born

Jawaharlal Nehru

[Creationists] make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected.

Nicolaus Copernicus

The whole action of the laws tended to increase the number of consumers of food and to diminish the number of producers, was due the invention of the Malthusian theory of population.

Henry Charles Carey

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

Catharine MacKinnon

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

Fashion as king is sometimes a very stupid ruler. As was observed a little way back, the kernel of Plücker's theory of geometric dimensionality is that the dimensionality of a given space is not an absolute constant, but depends upon the elements, accepted as irreducible, in terms of which the space is described.

Eric Temple Bell

The system becomes more coherent as it is further extended. The elements which we require for explaining a new class of facts are already contained in our system. Different members of the theory run together, and we have thus a constant convergence to unity. In false theories, the contrary is the case.

William Whewell

Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.

Jawaharlal Nehru

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it.

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

Growing up in Gary Indiana gave me, I think, a distinct advantage over many of my classmates who had grown up in affluent suburbs. They could read articles that argued that in competitive equilibrium, there could not be discrimination, so long as there are some non-discriminatory individuals or firms, since it would pay any such firm to hire the lower wage discriminated-against individuals, and take them seriously. I knew that discrimination existed, even though there were many individuals who were not prejudiced. To me, the theorem simply proved that one or more of the assumptions that went into the theory was wrong.

Joseph Stiglitz

Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.

By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

Hunter S. Thompson

The theory of rights enables us to rise and overthrow obstacles, but not to found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation.

Giuseppe Mazzini

While control is needed, and perfectly warranted, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection. This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth. Before the monopoly should be permitted, there must be reason to believe it will do some good — for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

Lawrence Lessig

I know that a good many champions have entertained the thought that the more they discourage youngsters, the longer they would reign. However, this theory never impressed me, and I always made it a point to give youths the benefit of my experience in bicycle racing.

Marshall Taylor

Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. As a puzzle-solving activity, normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand.

John Polkinghorne

But the nature of my main work in chemistry can be better represented by more than 280 English publications, of which roughly 200 concern the theory of chemical reactions and related subjects.

It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.