Against Method Quotes & Sayings

It seems perfectly clear that Economy, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science. There exists much prejudice against attempts to introduce the methods and language of mathematics into any branch of the moral sciences. Most persons appear to hold that the physical sciences form the proper sphere of mathematical method, and that the moral sciences demand some other method-I know not what. — William Stanley Jevons

The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial. — Isaiah Berlin

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of evidence against interest; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.) — Christopher Hitchens

The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research. — Elizabeth Blackwell

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do. — William Golding

Volatile expressions of anger and hostility combined with a tendency to blame others often result from feeling shame ... If you are shame-prone, any accusation directed at you, regardless of how mildly it may be delivered, has the potential to make you feel that you have failed or that you are inadequate. Rather than simply admit wrongdoing, you get angry and accusatory in order to hold yourself blameless. Using anger or hostility for self-protection hides your vulnerability and needs. Unfortunately, since most people are repelled by an angry response, this method may be effective.
Your anger may drive away the very people who should know your real feelings, and it may deprive you of the opportunity to allow others to be aware of your needs. Behaving in an offensive or frightening way toward others can cause them to retreat out of fear. But, actually, the fear is your own, which you have turned against someone else in the form of anger. — Mary C. Lamia

Christianity cannot subsist unless men know what Christianity is; and the fair and logical thing is to learn what Christianity is, not from its opponents, but from those who themselves are Christians. That method of procedure would be the only fair method in the case of any movement. [ ... ] Men have abundant opportunity today to learn what can be said against Christianity, and it is only fair that they should also learn something about the thing that is being attacked. — J. Gresham Machen

In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence. — Martin Luther King Jr.

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. — Iris Murdoch

Money is not a part of the visible sector of the economy; people do not consume money. Money is not a physical factor of production, but rather a yardstick for measuring economic input, economic outtake and the relative values of the real goods and services of the economic world. Money provides a method of measuring obligations, rights, powers and privileges. It provides a means whereby certain individuals can accumulate claims against others, or against the economy as a whole, or against many economies. — Louis O. Kelso

It is the rule which says that the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification. — Karl Popper

The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that, by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen. These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under the burden of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey's end. — Thomas Jefferson

Of course it was a method of play you had to change because people get the idea once they have played against you. — Jack Charlton

Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies and other businesses a method of hedging against adverse price changes. Instead, they've become just another Wall Street plaything. — Gary Weiss

To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practices on others — Samuel Johnson

[I am against] the Treaty of Rome which entrenches laissez faire as its philosophy and chooses bureaucracy as its administrative method. — Tony Benn

I firmly believe that the method which sets theological theories against scientifically ascertained facts, is fatal to the current theology and injurious to the spirit of religion; and that the method which frankly recognizes the facts of life, and appreciates the spirit of the scientists whose patient and assiduous endeavor has brought those facts to light, will commend the spirit of religion to the new generation, and will benefit
not impair
theology as a science, by compelling its reconstruction. — Lyman Abbott

The statistical method is required in the interpretation of figures which are at the mercy of numerous influences, and its object is to determine whether individual influences can be isolated and their effects measured. The essence of the method lies in the determination that we are really comparing like with like, and that we have not overlooked a relevant factor which is present in Group A and absent from Group B. The variability of human beings in their illnesses and in their reactions to them is a fundamental reason for the planned clinical trial and not against it. — Austin Bradford Hill

I'm not against the technology at all, I just don't like to use it if it's just to mimic what you can do with traditional methods. — Michel Gondry

Penance to be sure must be used as a tool, in due times and places, as need may be. If the flesh, being too strong, kicks against the spirit, penance takes the rod of discipline, and fast, and the cilice of many buds, and mighty vigils; and places burdens enough on the flesh, that it may be more subdued. But if the body is weak, fallen into illness, the rule of discretion does not approve of such a method. — St. Catherine Of Siena

I mutter and mutter and no one to listen. I speak my words in Japanese and my daughter will not hear them. The words that come from our ears, our mouths, they collide in the space between us.
"Obachan, please! I wish you would stop that. Is it too much to ask for some peace and quiet? You do this on purpose, don't you? Don't you! I just want some peace. Just stop! Please, just stop."
"Gomennasai. Waruine, Obachan wa. Solly. Solly."
Ha! Keiko, there is method in my madness. I could stand on my head and quote Shakespeare until I had a nosebleed, but to no avail, no one hears my language. So I sit and say the words and will, until the wind or I shall die. Someone, something must stand against this wind and I will. I am. — Hiromi Goto

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good provisions by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of dying for it.' — Thomas More

It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. — Edmund Burke

When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport. — Ashot Nadanian

It is very difficult to follow your own method all the time because you may crash against some directors who want from you something different. Trying to understand the material, who you're working with, and how can you fit in there. That is my approach. — Antonio Banderas

Everybody in the GE used secondaries. It was part of the culture now; socially acceptable. There had been many attempts by the Brussels parliament to legislate against it, and the Tax Bureau certainly did its best. But of course, if a method had been found to clear up people's finances and put them on a hundred per cent legitimate, transparent basis, it would have worked for everyone, politicians and tax officials included. — Peter F. Hamilton

If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes. — Alfred Tarski

Fascism is the most inherently evil political ideology that man has ever devised. Wherever we see even the smallest sapling of fascism growing, we should use every just, reasonable and humane method at our disposal to rip-it out by its roots and then salt the very earth wherein it grew, so that no other such thing may ever again take root. Of course, we must also take great care to ensure that during this process, we ourselves do not become fascists in the fight against fascism. — Derek R. Audette

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult
to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization
not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion. — Mark Slouka

The problem of the seizure of power brings in its train the problem of the State. The State and the
Revolution (1917), which deals with this subject, is the strangest and most contradictory of pamphlets.
Lenin employs in it his favorite method, which is the method of authority. With the help of Marx and
Engels, he begins by taking a stand against any kind of reformism which would claim to utilize the
bourgeois State - that organism of domination of one class over another. The bourgeois State owes its
survival to the police and to the army because it is primarily an instrument of oppression. It reflects both
the irreconcilable antagonism of the classes and the forcible subjugation of this antagonism. This
authority of fact is only worthy of contempt. — Albert Camus

I am up against the system, the whole method & approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administrative offices. This education had reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings & garbage ... — R.K. Narayan

Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on our willpower and determination. Whatever may be the issue for us--anger, fear, bitterness, gluttony, pride, lust, substance abuse--we determine never to do it again; we pray against it, fight against it, set our will against it. But the struggle is all in vain, and we find ourselves once again morally bankrupt or, worse yet, so proud of our external righteousness that "whitened sepulchers" is a mild description of our condition. — Richard J. Foster

Among some of the organized methods used to control the world is the thing known and called PROPAGANDA. Propaganda has done more to defeat the good intentions of races and nations than even open warfare. Propaganda is a method or medium used by organized peoples to convert others against their will. We of the Negro race are suffering more than any other race in the world from propaganda ... propaganda to destroy our hopes, our ambitions and our confidence in self. — Marcus Garvey

Every conceivable cruel method of blackmail was used against me to obtain by force and at all costs confessions and statements both about comrades who had been arrested, and about political activities. — Ernst Thalmann

After separating the DNA from the substrate and copying the DNA in a thermal cycler, Sci ran the samples through an instrument the size and shape of an office copy machine, a method called capillary electrophoresis. In this procedure, the material was sent through a long pathway, a capillary, that separated the DNA with attached dye by size and electrical charge. The output would be displayed as an electrophoretogram, ready to be matched against the national DNA database. — James Patterson

There are two ways of doing battle against Disgrace. You may live it down; or you may run away from it and hide. The first method is heart-breaking, but sure. The second cannot be relied upon because of the uncomfortable way Disgrace has of turning up at your heels. — Edna Ferber

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner. — Mike Lofgren

A few modern philosophers ... assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism. ... With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before. — Carol S. Dweck

Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself ... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education ... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances. — John Taylor Gatto

And it really can crunch. There is a constant danger of injuries from overwork. Close to performance time, a walk through the hallways near the pit can sometimes seem like a visit to a living catalog of alternative medicines: heat before playing, ice after playing, stretches against walls and doors, tai chi, the Feldenkrais Method, the Alexander Technique - all the major and minor bodywork systems have been used by colleagues at one time or another to make playing easier and more informed. Another way to make playing — Tom Heimberg

First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective. — Boris Beizer

The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist. — Karl Pearson

There are some modern practitioners, who declaim against medical theory in general, not considering that to think is to theorize; and that no one can direct a method of cure to a person labouring under disease, without thinking, that is, without theorizing; and happy therefore is the patient, whose physician possesses the best theory. — Erasmus Darwin

An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion. — Alfred North Whitehead

But, above all, it will confer an inestimable benefit on morality and religion, by showing that all the objections urged against them may be silenced for ever by the Socratic method, that is to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector. — Immanuel Kant

Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin ... — Edward Thomas

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. — John Michael Greer

The best method of protecting oneself against the inflow of negative thoughts being released by other people is that of keeping the broadcasting station so busy sending out positive thoughts that no time will be available for receiving negative thoughts. This formula is unbeatable. — Napoleon Hill

It is probably true that almost all atheists stand for the values of reason and freethought. I will attempt to put these values in more substantial terms. There is the belief that inquiry and doubt are essential checks against deception, self deception, and error. There is the belief that logic and the scientific method is the only way the world can arrive at an agreement on the truth about anything. — Richard Carrier

This education has reduced us to a nation of morons; we were strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage ... What about our own roots? ... I am up against the system, the whole method and approach of a system of education which makes us morons, cultural morons, but efficient clerks for all your business and administration offices. — R.K. Narayan

Anarchy is not a social form, but a method of individuation. No society will concede to me more than a limited freedom and a well-being that it grants to each of its members. But I am not content with this and want more. I want all that I have the power to conquer. Every society seeks to confine me to the august limits of the permitted and the prohibited . But I do not acknowledge these limits, for nothing is forbidden and all is permitted to those who have the force and the valor.

Consequently, anarchy, which is the natural liberty of the individual freed from the odious yoke of spiritual and material rulers, is not the construction of a new and suffocating society.' It is a decisive fight against all societies-christian, democratic, socialist, communist, etc., etc. Anarchism is the eternal struggle of a small minority of aristocratic outsiders against all societies which follow one another on the stage of history. — Renzo Novatore

In line with international law, only the U.N. Security Council could sanction the use of force against a sovereign state. Any other pretext or method which might be used to justify the use of force against an independent sovereign state are inadmissible and can only be interpreted as an aggression. — Vladimir Putin

Let me quickly remind you that the allegation of being mentally incapable is a tried and tested method of silencing women dating back hundreds of years, a weapon to discredit us when we fought against abuses and stood up to authority. — Tom Rob Smith

The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence. — Anthony Collins

A prisoner in the Inquisition is never allowed to see the face of his accuser, or of the witnesses against him, but every method is taken by threats and tortures, to oblige him to accuse himself, and by that means corroborate their evidence. — John Foxe

Look heah, now, I've got the wuhks of all the old mastahs - the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah - balance the disagweements - analyze the conflicting statements - decide which is pwobably cowwect - and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least" - patronizingly - "as I see it. — Isaac Asimov

With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I pity the small creatures the most, he thought. Those who have done the least harm. They above all do not deserve this. The goat-thing will single them out for the greatest suffering; it will afflict them in proportion to their innocence ... this is its method by which the great balance is tilted from rectitude, and the Plan undone. It will accuse the weak and destroy the helpless; it will use its power against those least able to defend themselves. And, most of all, it will devour the little hopes, the meager dreams of the small.
Here we must intervene, he said to himself. To protect the small. This is our first task and the first line of our defense. — Philip K. Dick

The surest method against scandal is to live it down by perseverance in well-doing, and by prayer to God that He would cure the distempered mind of those who traduce and injure us. — Herman Boerhaave

I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people's psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn't interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life. — Che Guevara

Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another. — Thomas Sowell

Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the 'right' of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the 'property rights' of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. — Ron Paul

One cannot have a trade union or a democratic election without freedom of speech, freedom of association and assembly. Without a democratic election, whereby people choose and remove their rulers, there is no method of securing human rights against the state. No democracy without human rights, no human rights without democracy, and no trade union rights without either. That is our belief; that is our creed. — George Meany

Some psychologists and philosophers are distrustful of the concept of self. They argue against it because they do not like separating man from the continuum with animals, and they believe the concept of the self gets in the way of scientific experimentation. But rejecting the concept of "self" as "unscientific" because it cannot be reduced to mathematical equations is roughly the same as the argument two and three decades ago that Freud's theories and the concept of "unconscious" motivation were "unscientific." It is a defensive and dogmatic science - and therefore not true science - which uses a particular scientific method as a Procrustean bed and rejects all forms of human experience which don't fit. — Rollo May

While Docker automatically captures logs for you, it does not also rotate them. In fact, currently none of the provided packages set up any log rotation. You'll need to do that yourself in most cases. Rather frustratingly, Docker also does not respond to a signal to tell it to reopen logs. If you send it the standard HUP signal, it will instead restart all the containers, which is not what you want. The current best practice for rotation of Docker logs is to have logrotate use the copytruncate method to copy the logfile and then truncate it in place. There are open bugs against docker asking for a better solution. — Karl Matthias

So, suspecting that Nero had a contract on her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons that would have been available to her son's underlings. Like Mithridates, Agrippina eventually died by more mechanical methods as her son (supposedly) had assassins slay her, thus providing us with the small but meaningful lesson that one cannot be robust against everything. And, two thousand years later, nobody has found a method for us to get "fortified" against swords. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Men of great genius, whether their work be in poetry, philosophy or art, stand in all ages like isolated heroes, keeping up single-handed a desperate struggling against the onslaught of an army of opponents. Is not this characteristic of the miserable nature of mankind? The dullness, grosness, perversity, silliness, and brutality of by far the greater part of the race are always an obstacle to the efforts of the genius, whatever be the method of his art; they so form that hostile army to which he at last has to succumb. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless. — Rajneesh

As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. — Isaac Newton

I like to watch an old boatman rowing, especially one who has been hired by the hour. There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life. He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him - all those that are going his way. This would trouble and irritate some people; the sublime equanimity of the hired boatman under the ordeal affords us a beautiful lesson against ambition and uppishness. Plain — Jerome K. Jerome