Top 74 General Theory Quotes
#1. Starting in the seventeenth century, the general theory of extreme values - maxima and minima - has become one of the systematic integrating principles of science.
Richard Courant
#2. Here's the general theory: To clarify, add detail. Imagine that. To clarify, add detail. And clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don't start throwing out information, instead fix the design.
Edward Tufte
#3. The thing I want to do is put as many new ideas into the law as I can, to show how particular solutions involve general theory, and to do it with style. I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#4. To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
Thomas Nagel
#5. Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]
Thomas I. Emerson
#6. One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.
J.G. Ballard
#7. For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.
Stephen Hawking
#8. The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
Murray N. Rothbard
#9. Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space.
Walter Isaacson
#10. His new idea was published that month in what became yet another seminal Einstein paper, "Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity."9 On the surface, it did indeed seem to be based on a crazy notion: space has no borders because gravity bends it back on itself. Einstein
Walter Isaacson
#11. To explain why a man slipped on a banana peel, we do not need a general theory of slipping.
Sidney Morgenbesser
#12. For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves.
Matt Ridley
#13. When forced to summarize the general theory of relativity in one sentence: Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.
Albert Einstein
#14. Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages ... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on ... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
Umberto Eco
#15. The theory of the determination of wages in a free market is simply a special case of the general theory of value. Wages are the price of labour.
Sir John Richard Hicks
#16. The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.
Stephen Jay Gould
#17. Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.
Saunders Mac Lane
#18. I subscribed to the general theory that the worst room in the best hotel was better than the best room in a second-rate hotel.
Beatriz Williams
#19. If I still had the space, charcoal, and available walls,
I could compose a great work about forgetting:
a general theory of oblivion.
Jose Eduardo Agualusa
#20. Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
Stephen Hawking
#21. It is ironic that Einsteins most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] ...
Robert B. Laughlin
#22. We lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.
E. H. Moore
#23. General theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century.
Stephen Hawking
#24. I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.
George Soros
#25. It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.
Michael Moorcock
#26. In my personal experience I have hardly come to know the wretchedness of mankind better than as a result of the general theory of relativity and everything connected to it. But it doesn't bother me.
Albert Einstein
#27. The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts - and not absolute and general.
Jiang Zemin
#28. Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law.
Barney Frank
#29. Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners' obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models.
Robert Higgs
#30. I think game theory creates ideas that are important in solving and approaching conflict in general.
Robert Aumann
#31. Asked in 1919 whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the theory of general relativity, [Eddington] allegedly replied: 'Who's the third?
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#32. Filmmaking in general is about feeling and not about theory. You need to know a lot of rules about filmmaking: character development, grammar, and all these thing, but then you use it instinctively. I ask myself this question all the time. I have no solid theory, I just do what I feel is right.
Hany Abu-Assad
#33. In the next place, the state governments are, by the very theory of the constitution, essential constituent parts of the general government. They can exist without the latter, but the latter cannot exist without them.
Joseph Story
#34. In general, a fact is worth more than theories in the long run. The theory stimulates, but the fact builds. The former in due time is replaced by one better but the fact remains and becomes fertile.
Theobald Smith
#35. I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency.
John Rawls
#36. In the midst of all this great variety of subjects, an individual cannot attain to perfection in each, because it is scarcely in his power to take in and comprehend the general theories of them.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#37. Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike 'Einsteinism', seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.
Richard Dawkins
#38. Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities
that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.
Edgar Allan Poe
#39. If, as is the custom, I speak mainly about my own researches, I must say that I was fortunate in finding that not everything had yet been gleaned in the field of general thermodynamic radiation theory.
Wilhelm Wien
#40. General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures.
Paul Davies
#41. Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement
Fritjof Capra
#42. Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement
Stephen Jay Gould
#43. A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.
Bill Gaede
#44. I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.
Gerard Debreu
#45. The general point that a political theory is, among other things, a partisan intervention, is well taken. So question about the actual political implication of a theory cannot be excluded as, in principle, irrelevant.
Raymond Geuss
#46. The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary; but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler.
Lord Chesterfield
#47. The theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. And I think to some extent, before you're going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education.
Charlie Munger
#48. He is a general at war with his own army. An exhorter of radical beliefs, shrinking from their obvious conclusions. It was so much easier in the lecture hall, the salon, the seminar. When theory need not be demonstrated in blood.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#49. Combining quantum entanglement with wormholes yields mind boggling results about black holes. But I don't trust them until we have a theory of everything which can combine quantum effects with general relativity. i.e. we need to have a full blown string theory resolve this sticky question.
Michio Kaku
#50. I always found it satisfying that gravity was described by Einstein's geometric theory of general relativity.
Antony Garrett Lisi
#51. Looking back to data, we can see if the consequences are plausible; looking forward to theory, we can see if general principles are suggested.
John Henry Holland
#52. Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#53. And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn's famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships - all relations - involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?
Zadie Smith
#54. Gut?"
"General Unified Theory." Kohler quipped. "The theory of everything.
Dan Brown
#55. The star S0-2 orbits around Sgr A* every 16 years and will go through its closest approach in 2018. That's an opportunity to test Einstein's General Relativity theory through very precise measurements of this star's short period orbit.
Andrea M. Ghez
#56. The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.
Michael Lewis
#57. A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.
Carlo Rovelli
#58. The Great Pyramid of Giza was designed in agreement with the Theory of General Relativity.
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#59. One theory is that those who think positively are less affected by stress, but another possibility is that those who think positively tend to live a healthier, longer life in general because they exercise more, follow a better diet, and avoid unhealthy addictions like alcohol and drugs.
Katelyn Williams
#60. Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.
Noam Chomsky
#62. Einstein's theory of General Relativity has a mathematical structure very similar to Yang-Mills theory.
Chen-Ning Yang
#63. I've since come to understand that the universe operates on the same general equilibrium theory as markets.It never gives you something without making you pay for it somehow.
Gayle Forman
#64. The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.
Noam Chomsky
#65. I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.
Kip Thorne
#66. It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.
Vladimir Lenin
#67. Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction.
Ellen Glasgow
#68. Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.
Roy H. Williams
#69. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#70. I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.
David Eddings
#71. The chemist in America has in general been content with what I have called a loafer electron theory. He has imagined the electrons sitting around on dry goods boxes at every corner [viz. the cubic atom], ready to shake hands with, or hold on to similar loafer electrons in other atoms.
Robert Andrews Millikan
#72. Einstein, my upset stomach hates your theory [of General Relativity] - it almost hates you yourself! How am I to' provide for my students? What am I to answer to the philosophers?!!
Paul Ehrenfest
#73. I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It's just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.
Jerrod Carmichael
#74. Using theory can help to justify actions and explain practice to service users, carers and society in general.
Siobhan Maclean
