Top 100 In Theory Quotes
#1. 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.
Michio Kaku
#2. In theory, I stick to how I could eat if I lived a thousand years ago. I take processed foods off the menu, and stick to things I could hunt or gather, with more fruits, vegetables, and nuts - and less meat.
Parker Young
#3. I have a new theory about algebra," I said. "In going to learn it by osmosis.
Robin McKinley
#4. The idea of stopping is not unmeaningful to me. I think there might be a time when, in theory at least, you'd say, 'Well I've mostly done what I want to do.' But how could you ever prevent a few years down the line some germ of an idea getting at you and you've got to do it again?
Graham Swift
#5. It was only much later that he was made flesh and blood [in the Gospels] on paper. Thus Christ was created as a literary creation.
Paul Louis Couchoud
#6. Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.
Peter Medawar
#7. The proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.
Steven Weinberg
#8. There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black.
Keegan-Michael Key
#9. Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.
Michael Crichton
#10. Einstein comes along and says, space and time can warp and curve, that's what gravity is. Now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism - all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see.
Brian Greene
#11. Barbarianism and finesse cannot be rolled into one, Pricey defeats this theory. The barbarianism born from his fight to make it in life, his finesse brought about by his sensitivity that was deprived of him when he was a child.
Stephen Richards
#12. In the head-spinning cosmos of climate change, everyday hundreds of people claim there are 'thousands of papers' in support of a theory, yet no one can actually name one single paper with empirical evidence that shows carbon dioxide emissions are the main cause of global warming.
Joanne Nova
#13. I would not call myself a veteran conspiracy theorist. Or an obsessed one. I pretty much peaked on the whole conspiracy theory thing in the '60s, with the grassy knoll, who really killed JFK, and who ordered the hit on Lee Harvey Oswald.
Patti Davis
#14. The efficient market theory is one of the better models in the sense that it can be taken as true for every purpose I can think of. For investment purposes, there are very few investors that shouldn't behave as if markets are totally efficient.
Eugene Fama
#15. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.
Mao Zedong
#16. Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Iain M. Banks
#17. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government.
Joseph Story
#18. The state and its elites must be subject, in theory and in practice, to the same laws that its poorest citizens are.
Mo Ibrahim
#19. It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response.
Bell Hooks
#20. Finding Mecca in America weaves social theory and concrete ethnography into a significant contribution on Muslims in the United States, illuminating broader questions about the integration of minority and immigrant groups along the way. This is an important work and a joy to read.
Eboo Patel
#22. The theory of the free press is not that the truth will be presented completely or perfectly in any one instance, but that the truth will emerge from free discussion
E. E. Cummings
#23. 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
#24. My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.
Georges Cuvier
#25. In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught;but in life there are many things to draw us aside.
Epictetus
#26. The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories ... They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's.
George Gilder
#27. [In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.
Antonia Fraser
#28. The theory of three person in one God (that is, a personal Trinity or Tri-unity) suggests polytheism, rather than the one ever-present I AM ... Jesus Christ is not God, as Jesus himself declared, but is the Son of God.
Mary Baker Eddy
#29. The USA and the Soviet Union each had the ability to annihilate the other. Therefore- in theory at least-neither of these growling superpowers would dare attack the other, because to do so would result in its own immolation.
Mal Peet
#30. on the meanings of the behaviors rather than the behaviors themselves. Chapter 2 reviews the historical roots of identity theory, not only in symbolic interaction, but also, just as crucially, in the cybernetics
Anonymous
#31. The first time I was in Stockholm, everybody was real cordial, but I started having these nightmares that I was being watched by aliens, basically all the time. My theory on it was that it was really, really unnerving to be in a place where English isn't the first language.
Mikky Ekko
#32. Quantum physics is no longer an abstract theory for specialists. We must now absolutely include it in our education and also in our culture.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
#33. My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.
Ida Tarbell
#34. If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, hassome indirect systematic efficacy in the development of theory.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#35. That's what in theory differentiates a writer from everyone else. You see and hear more clearly.
Don DeLillo
#36. The Big Bang Theory: When geeky scientists can be main characters in a hit prime time series, you know there's hope for the world.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#37. The calcium theory has probably done more to damage our health than any single theory in the history of humanity.
David Wolfe
#38. I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.
Octavia Butler
#39. Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.
William James
#40. I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation.
Pieter Zeeman
#41. The problem with feature filmmaking is that it offers you this mirage of being able to achieve perfection, as the theory of it is that you have control of every part of the film, though in reality, it is as inexact as the next thing in your life.
Kapil Sharma
#42. We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#43. private philanthropy is no substitution for hard-fought battles over labour laws and social security, in part because philanthropy can be retracted on a whim, while elected officials, at least in theory, have citizens to answer to.
Linsey McGoey
#44. I have a theory that the answers to all of life's major questions can found in a John Mayer song.
Susane Colasanti
#45. We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.
Tim Wirth
#46. The attempt to isolate economics from other disciplines-notably politics, history, philosophy, finance, constitutional theory and sociology-has fatally disabled its power to explain what is happening in the world.
Will Hutton
#47. Your theory of partial immortality is abhorrent to me. I would rather disbelieve in the immortality of my own soul than suppose the boon given to me was withheld from any of my fellow creatures.
Fanny Kemble
#48. A theory's assumptions always are and ought to be unrealistic. Further, we should attempt to make them more unrealistic in order to increase a theory's fruitfulness.
Satoshi Kanazawa
#49. They're around back," she calls down when Julie and I get out. "Planning their strategy." "Good for them," I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a man like me.
Richard Russo
#50. Capablanca did not apply himself to opening theory (in which he never therefore achieved much), but delved deeply into the study of end-games and other simple positions which respond to technique rather than to imagination.
Max Euwe
#51. His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.
Graham Swift
#52. People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don't give us a chance to tell them anything about one of the theories that we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don't know.
Richard P. Feynman
#53. We cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.
Miguel Nicolelis
#54. Internationalism is a social and political theory, a certain concept of how human society ought to be organized, and in particular a concept of how the nations ought to organize their mutual relations.
Christian Lous Lange
#55. The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains without substance, a realm from which the crucial dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.42 Who, then, can criticize this situation?
Morris Berman
#56. According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe.
Gary Zukav
#57. All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many.
Ulrich Beck
#58. In my experience nobody gets to lead a totally charmed existence. Nobody escapes the pitfalls of being a human being. It's what seperates us from the zebras. Or that's my theory anyway
Sarah-Kate Lynch
#59. Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities.
Arthur Keith
#60. But the scientific importance of a change in knowledge of fact consists precisely in j its having consequences for a system of theory.
Talcott Parsons
#61. His doubts recall Benford's Law, a theory about the frequency with which digits will appear in data. One implication of this law is that datasets with lots of zeroes at the end often turn out to be fraudulent.
Simon Kuper
#62. If history is any guide at all, it seems to me to suggest that there is a final theory. In this century we have seen a convergence of the arrows of explanation, like the convergence of meridians toward the North Pole.
Steven Weinberg
#63. It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict.
Anatol Rapoport
#64. In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk ... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more.
Jean-Baptiste Dumas
#65. The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government.
George Monbiot
#66. There is no way to learn endurance other than simply to endure. We can't learn it in principle or in theory; only pain can teach it to us.
Chris Tiegreen
#67. I have a theory that those mutants retain some memory of what they were in life, and that draws them to where they used to live. That's probably bullshit, but since I seem to be the only man alive, my theories are the best in this part of the world.
Manel Loureiro
#68. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe ... that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market ... That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#69. The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas.
Paul Fry
#70. Tattoos are so widespread, so ugly and so very, very permanent. You can, in theory, have them removed - but a large chunk of your living flesh will go with it.
Tony Parsons
#71. We have confirmed something we only knew in theory, namely that revolution, in which uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces operate imperiously, is blind and destructive, grandiose and cruel.
Federica Montseny
#72. Einstein, like myself, found Bern pleasant but boring. And so I wonder: If the Swiss were more interesting, might he never have daydreamed as much as he did? Might he never have developed the Special Theory of Relativity? In other words, is there something to be said for boredom?
Eric Weiner
#73. You see, here's my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.
Mitch Albom
#74. There is the theory ... that you live in two places: You either live in fear, or you live in love.
Michael Keaton
#75. I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
Bharati Mukherjee
#76. You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory.
Eric Weiner
#77. Langmuir is a regular thinking machine. Put in facts, and you get out a theory.
Saul Dushman
#78. 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
#79. In 1989, I was awarded the Von Neumann Prize in Operations Research Theory by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. They cited my works in the areas of portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and the SIMSCRIPT programming language.
Harry Markowitz
#80. My number-one theory in life is that style is proportional to your lack of resources - the less you have, the more stylish you're likely to be.
Beth Ditto
#81. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.
Marc Andreessen
#82. All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice.
Karl Marx
#83. An individual understands a concept, skill, theory, or domain of knowledge to the extent that he or she can apply it appropriately in a new situation.
Howard Gardner
#84. The great Baseball Hall-of-Famer Tom Seaver put it perfectly: In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.
Jeff Olson
#85. Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.
Brian Greene
#86. In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn't?
Sebastian Junger
#87. My theory is, if you can do comedy and you can be in a scene with someone like Brad Garrett and hold your own, you've really got a future in this business.
Faith Ford
#88. When I was in high school, I was really into string theory and superstring theory and read 'Scientific American.' It's fascinating.
Sam Trammell
#89. I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.
Seymour Hersh
#90. Writing should be an adventure, shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, blessed with amazing grace. In theory, of course
Syd Field
#91. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
W. H. Auden
#92. In theory, I always think I should totally go back to school, because I don't want to start sinking slowly ... I want to learn, blah blah blah. Then I think about actually going and sitting in classes and, man, it sounds terrible.
Conor Oberst
#93. The motivating force of the theory of a Democratic way of life is still a belief that as individuals we live cooperatively, and, to the best of our ability, serve the community in which we live ...
Eleanor Roosevelt
#94. Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works - but our lives refute our faith.
Brennan Manning
#95. I have a theory that the secret of marital happiness is simple: drink in different pubs to your other half.
Jilly Cooper
#96. Classical physics has been superseded by quantum theory: quantum theory is verified by experiments. Experiments must be described in terms of classical physics.
Carl Friedrich Von Weizsacker
#97. The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.
Ernst Mayr
#98. For the most part, quantum theory has been of little practical value in my life.
Jenny Diski
#99. While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#100. Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
Peter Thiel
