theories Quotes

“Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories.”

“We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.”

“One of the things Ford had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day’, ‘You’re very tall’, or ‘You seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?’ At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical, and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.”

“In the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.”

“The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”

“Skills make you rich, not theories.”

“If Darwin were alive today the insect world would delight and astound him with its impressive verification of his theories of the survival of the fittest. Under the stress of intensive chemical spraying the weaker members of the insect populations are being weeded out. Only the strong and fit remain to defy our efforts to control them.”

“I’d prefer a world with no identity politics. I’d prefer we judged people according to reason, logic and evidence instead of barmy left-wing theories about ‘oppression.’ ”

“In bantering lies the key to human warmth.”

“Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.”

“My mind was already in revolution; my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment . . . And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.”

“Scientific people . . . know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.”

“Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”

“Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty and all embarrassment into laughter.”

“In a word, human kingdoms are established by divine providence.”

“The farther I go the more confidence I feel. The order of these volcanic formations affords the strongest confirmation to the theories of Davy.”

“Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consumption, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”

“Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao . . . or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses.”

“At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ – to their irrational impulses.”

“If man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be.”

“The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”

“There’s a dirty little secret that the scientific establishment has been trying to keep under wraps for years: There are many unproven theories that are being taught to people as if they were established fact.”

“The Intelligent Design proponents make a compelling, and totally legitimate, argument that if a theory has not been proven, then one suggested theory is just as good as another.”

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

“His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”

“You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.”

“Let us leave theories there and return to here’s hear.”

“Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it?”