Theory Quotes

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

“Guilt is an acknowledgment of debt for unbalanced transactions.”
― Heather Marsh, The Creation of Me, Them and Us

“Yoga is not a theory, but a journey to find inner bliss, inner joy, and reveal its magnificence.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Psychology has left humanity with the saddest of all creation myths and the
means to mask their pain through drugs and normalized
exploitation of others. Perhaps we could try again.”
― Heather Marsh, The Creation of Me, Them and Us

“Psychologists and philosophers created a world where anxiety, fear and struggle are the norm, where happiness and peace are impossible to attain or available only to the most adept after long torment, and where existence is, above all, futile.”
― Heather Marsh, The Creation of Me, Them and Us

“When many people become bonded into one self, as an endogroup, an artificial person is created as an ideal. This endogroup ideal, or endo-ideal becomes the group. Its identity is adopted by every member of the group and the individuals also become the endogroup. The group identity subsumes the self for all except the endo-ideal, creating a special subset of reality which here we will call an endoreality”
― Heather Marsh, The Creation of Me, Them and Us

“An endogroup acts as an individual self. It therefore needs only one mind to lead it, or the ideology of one mind. Those that become the endo-ideal are forever entitled to the service of others and ownership of the group. Those that become the reflectors are forever assigned to the service of others and the duty to reflect. Those that are cast as the negative image are condemned to carry all guilt and undergo all penance.”
― Heather Marsh, The Creation of Me, Them and Us

“There are four elements of a healthy self: a personal membrane, euphoria, euphoric conduits and a drive to exosocial expansion. The obstacles to creating this self are endosocial membranes.”
― Heather Marsh, Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale

“The acceptance of guilt and debt is the mark of a negative image and the wait for atonement is the mark of a reflector.”
― Heather Marsh, The Creation of Me, Them and Us

“There is also a reassuring modesty in more recent claims made for a ‘theory of translation.’ After Babel tries to show that there cannot, in any strict or responsible sense, be any such ‘theory.’ The cerebral proceedings which would have to underlie and explain it are simply inaccessible. At best, we have narratives of translational praxis." - George Steiner in the Preface to the third edition of 'After Babel'.”
― George Steiner (Author) by John Steiner (Author)

“It should not be supposed that every advance in human knowledge increases the amount of information that has to be mastered by professionals. On the contrary, some of the most important progress in science is the discovery and testing of powerful new theories that allow large numbers of facts to be subsumed under a few general principles. There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories. Hence it is not safe to say that the professional chemist must learn more today than a half century ago, before the general laws of quantum mechanics were announced.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“Each failure is another step towards discovery.”
― Steven Magee

“A lack of understanding of the theory leaves you unable to differentiate between a necessary aspect of a method and an arbitrary one.”
― John Yorke

“Theory is never so fine as when it takes the form of a fiction or a fable.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Let us fight to eradicate Climate Change and Inequality together...”
― Blaze Goldburst, Reversed Order Existence

“The most perfect synthesis of theory and practice is the vanishing of thought into the actual course of the world.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“A theory, a theorem and a hypothesis walk into a bar, but leave as soon as the bartender asks them for proofs.”
― Rajesh`

“Reversibility, like that of day and night, of all the concepts at the equatorial heart of the system: this paradoxical, derisory, indefensible and therefore impregnable position is the bitter privilege of phantom rhetorics.

As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveller is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.

Theory must not only be cut off from its reference, but also from any commentary: it's not normal to carry out an autopsy on a newborn child.

Is not the world itself, once it is removed from the nightmare of objectivity perpetrated by science - the intention of which was to pay it impartial homage - an effect without a cause? And thus also without consequence. There is no sense, then, in musing on its failure.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“2+2=4 in all but theoretical instances, and life is no mere theory. If we value reason we must fight for it.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“The automatic carriage-return on the typewriter, electronic central locking of cars: these are the things that count. The rest is just theory and literature.

Space is what prevents everything from being in the same place. Language is what prevents everything from meaning the same thing.

My hand, separated from me, dreams it is holding a breast. Nothing fills a hand better than a breast. Stereotype of a sadistic tenderness.

This journal develops, as its title indicates, over the course of time. However it is haunted by something which preceded it, the secret underlying event.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Theory does not derive its legitimacy from established facts, but from future events. Its value is not in the past events it can illuminate, but in the shockwave of the events it prefigures. It does not act upon consciousness, but directly on the course of things from which it draws its energy. It therefore has to be dis tinguished from the academic practice of philosophy and from all that is written with an eye to the history of ideas.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.
We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature
again over by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up
and sets each one at work.”
― William James

“At least you’re still alive. The Theory of Three: Up, down, or the same. Happy, sad or indifferent. In this case, pleasure, pain or nothing at all: death.”
― Dani J. Caile, Farkas Alpha: Book 3

“As an Apple phone loses most of its value without the 'Apple' logo, similarly, research loses its value without the related use of theory!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“Theories are like mathematical formulas. As the formulas help us to solve the sums, similarly, the theories help us to establish our point[s] in research!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“একটি অ্যাপল ফোন যেমন ‘অ্যাপল’ লোগো ছাড়া অনেকটা মূল্য হারায়, তেমনি সম্পর্কিত তত্ত্বের ব্যবহার ছাড়া গবেষণাও তার মূল্য হারায়!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“তত্ত্বগুলো গাণিতিক সূত্রের মতো। সূত্রগুলো যেমন অংকের সমাধানে সাহায্য করে, তেমনি তত্ত্বগুলো গবেষণায় আমাদের বিষয়বস্তু প্রতিষ্ঠায় সাহায্য করে!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“In any analysis of any part of the world, it is mandatory to institute a general reasoning in which the whole – the Absolute – is also included. This is what science scrupulously avoids. Science is all about the parts, and ignoring the whole. Science is non-holistic, which is why it cannot arrive at a grand unified, final theory of everything. From the whole you can get to every part, because the whole defines the parts. If you start with the parts, as science does, you can never get to the whole because the parts are necessarily defined piecemeal, heuristically and with no regard to the whole, since the whole is unknown. A bottom-up approach can never work. Only top-down approaches have any chance of working. Empiricists are always parts people and bottom-up people. Rationalists are holistic and top-down. These are opposite worldviews. The PSR is an explanatory, top-down principle. Randomness is a non-explanatory, bottom-up speculation.”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“Extremism begets extremism. Its stripe and shape is irrelevant because radical evil is always committed in the name of a greater good, whether clothed as progress or tradition. In an interdependent world, the atrocities beyond our imagined borders do not solely express the cruelty of others; they are also connected with our own beliefs and actions, our glorification of greed, our cynical geopolitical games, which we sanitize and justify with our political sophistication. In ancient times, the Buddhist pilgrims in Bamiyan would have simply called it karma: what we release into the universe now will come back to us in the future.”
― Payam Akhavan, In Search of A Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey

“In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted. The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways - which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities - was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay