Postulates Quotes & Sayings

Some kind of deliberate planning is necessary. But which kind and how much? We cannot answer these questions, cannot pass judgment on any given scheme, except by constantly referring back to our ideal postulates. In considering any plan we must ask whether it will help to transform the society to which it is applied into a just, peaceable, morally and intellectually progressive community of non-attached and responsible men and women. If so, we can say that the plan is a good one. If not, we must pronounce it to be bad. — Aldous Huxley

String theory?[pause] It closed the conceptual gulp between relativity and quantum mechanics. It postulates that subatomic particles are not points, but strings, about one planck length long. The rate at which strings vibrate can generate the properties of all known particles. Huh? How did I know that? — Willie Garson

That is, for a mathematical Platonist, what the C.H. proofs really show is that set theory needs to find a better set of core axioms than classical ZFS, or at least it will need to add some further postulates that are-like the Axiom of Choice-both "self-evident" and Consistent with classical axioms. If you're interested, Godel's own personal view was that the Continuum Hypothesis is false, that there are actually a whole (Infinity Symbol) of Zeno-type (Infinity Symbol)s nested between (Aleph0) and c, and that sooner or later a principle would be found that proved this. As of now no such principle's ever been found. Godel and Cantor both died in confinement, bequeathing a world with no finite circumference. One that spins, now, in a new kind of all-formal Void. Mathematics continues to get out of bed. — David Foster Wallace

The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. — Richard Dawkins

If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see. — Italo Calvino

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes. ( ... )
If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity. — Emil Cioran

Technos and clerics have much in common. Both take a world that can't be fully understood and try to explain its fundamental properties.
Clerics postulate beliefs that can never be proven; they demand you accept these postulates as your Faith, which will guide your actions and thoughts. It's a top down way of thinking; start with the big picture and derive rules for living. Fundamental knowledge is static. Even the derived rules rarely change.
Technos work from the bottom up. They build a baseline of observations and formulate theories to explain these phenomena. Nothing is sacred; with new observations, theories are discarded or modified to fit the facts.
Technos and clerics; how could they not be in conflict?
Dan Ronco's Diary, 2016
— Dan Ronco

Early in "Postulates of Linguistics," Deleuze and Guattari claim that, "the elementary unit of language ... is the order-word," which "not to be believe but to be obeyed" (ATP, 76). Perhaps the starkest example is the judge's sentence that condemns a criminal to death (80-81; 94). But the French for order-word, mot d'ordre, also refers to the political slogan, which is substantiated by Deleuze and Guattari's reference to Lenin's pamphlet "On Slogans" (83). Both of these examples indicate how closely their linguistics aligns with the rhetorical theory of symbolic action. Rhetoric is excellent at studying those acts that cause incorporeal transformations, which as changes in a state of affairs that do not directly alter its materiality (80-88). — Anonymous

Without knowing it, I had stumbled upon one of the basic postulates of homeschooling: Anything you do with a home-schooled child outside the home can be described as a "field trip", thus rendering whatever activity you pursue a legitimate educational experience. — Quinn Cummings

My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics
a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification. Such a world view is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences, and its acceptance or nonacceptance would have no effect on most scientific research. — Thomas Nagel

Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them. — Isaac Asimov

The concept of evolution postulates that living organisms have common roots, and in turn, the existence of common features is powerful support for the concept of evolution. — Hans Adolf Krebs

Tell me it's never been done. Because the only real laws in this world-the only things we really know-are the two postulates of relativity, the three laws of Newton, the four laws of thermodynamics, and Maxwell's equation-no, scratch that, the only things we really know are Maxwell's equations, the three laws of Newton, the two postulates of relativity, and the periodic table. That's all we know that's true. All the rest are man's laws — Dean Kamen

The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a [person] postulates as being a greater totality than [oneself] can become a symbol of the self. For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as the definition would require. — Carl Jung

Three principles - the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality - are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics. — Murray Gell-Mann

The assumption that the laws of nature are eternal is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving. Or perhaps they are not laws at all, but more like habits. — Rupert Sheldrake

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. — Emil Cioran

Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded. — Roland Barthes

But total freedom is no more easy to conquer than individual freedom. To ensure man's empire over the
world, it is necessary to suppress in the world and in man everything that escapes the Empire, everything
that does not come under the reign of quantity: and this is an endless undertaking. The Empire must
embrace time, space, and people, which compose the three dimensions of history. It is simultaneously
war, obscurantism, and tyranny, desperately affirming that one day it will be liberty, fraternity, and truth;
the logic of its postulates obliges it to do so — Albert Camus

I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto. — Georg Baselitz

I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe. — William Howard Taft

We should always be working towards the reinforcement of our postulates and not our actions, and much less our assumptions about reality or even ourselves. And this, simply because what we create reflects back at us and changes us. — Robin Sacredfire

Many people give the appearance of progress by shedding the prejudices and irrational postulates of one generation only to acquire those of the next. — T. S. Eliot

Do you remember, Meir, that epigram quoted in the name of Rabbi Johanan ben Zaccai: 'There is no truth unless there be a faith on which it may rest'? Ironically enough the only sure principle I have achieved is this which I have known almost all my life. And it is so. For all truths rest ultimately on some act of faith, geometry on axioms, the sciences on the assumptions of the objective existence and orderliness of the world of nature. In every realm one must lay down postulates or he shall have nothing at all. So with morality and religion. Faith and reason are not antagonists. On the contrary, salvation is through the commingling of the two, the former to establish first premises, the latter to purify them of confusion and to draw the fullness of their implications. It is not certainty which one acquires so, only plausibility, but that is the best we can hope for. — Milton Steinberg

I do not believe in the bundle theory anyway. The bundle theory postulates universals and I do not believe in them; so I do not believe in the bundle theory. — Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

Mars, therefore, is not only uninhabited by intelligent beings such as Mr. Lowell postulates, but is absolutely uninhabitable. — Alfred Russel Wallace

Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology. We can sometimes say that if such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such must follow absolutely. But the truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else again. — Gregory Bateson

Often one postulates that a priori, all states are equally probable. This is not true in the world as we see it. This world is not correctly described by the physics which assumes this postulate. — Richard P. Feynman

We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses - in short, from fewer premises. — Aristotle.

Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? ... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended. — Albert Camus

A good theory explains a lot but postulates little. — Richard Dawkins

Reason excludes faith," Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. "It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that. — Mark Helprin

I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80's. At that time I was a skeptic - the argument based on Koch's postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. ... Today I would regard the success of the many antiviral agents which lower the virus titers (to be expected) and also resolve the failure of the immune system (only expected if the virus is the cause of the failure) as a reasonable proof of the causation argument. — Walter Gilbert

In this book," he said, "Mr. Simak postulates the idea that there are a number of worlds like ours. Not other planets but other Earths, parallel Earths, in a kind of ring around the sun. — Stephen King

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. — Richard Dawkins

If a contract, either civil or natural, could still bind the
king and his people, there would be a mutual obligation; the will of the people could not set itself up as
absolute judge to pronounce absolute judgment. Therefore it is necessary to prove that no agreement
binds the people and the king. In order to prove that the people are themselves the embodiment of eternal
truth it is necessary to demonstrate that royalty is the embodiment of eternal crime. Saint-Just, therefore,
postulates that every king is a rebel or a usurper. He is a rebel against the people whose absolute
sovereignty he usurps. Monarchy is not a king, "it is crime." Not a crime, but crime itself, says Saint-Just;
in other words, absolute profanation. — Albert Camus

The fact that psychology postulates an external material world and studies it in so far as it comes to be reflected in consciousness, points to another postulate which psychology must assume in addition, namely, the existence of an inner world consciousness. — Boris Sidis

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas. — Northrop Frye

But in the present century, thanks in good part to the influence of Hilbert, we have come to see that the unproved postulates with which we start are purely arbitrary. They must be consistent, they had better lead to something interesting. — Julian Coolidge

Finally there are simple ideas of which no definition can be given; there are also axioms or postulates, or in a word primary principles, which cannot be proved and have no need of proof. — Gottfried Leibniz

We hear much nowadays as to the speculative ideas of men concerning the condition beyond the grave; but the admission that there is an individual existence beyond the grave, is a declaration that there must have been an individual, intelligent creation before we came here in the flesh. Life beyond the grave postulates a pre-existent state. — James E. Talmage

'Fahrenheit 451' postulates a lot of things I didn't want to have happen. — Ray Bradbury

You can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. — Mark Helprin

The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. — Margaret Mead

We may first observe that communism and socialism
which we shall hereafter group together and dub Statism
cannot live with Christianity nor with any religion that postulates a Creator such as the Declaration of Independence recognizes. The slaves of Statism must know no power, no authority, no source of blessing, no God, but the State ... — J. Reuben Clark

Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength. — Jessica Hagy

If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it! — Richard Dawkins

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero. — Subhajit Ganguly

Certainly it is permitted to anyone to put forward whatever hypotheses he wishes, and to develop the logical consequences contained in those hypotheses. But in order that this work merit the name of Geometry, it is necessary that these hypotheses or postulates express the result of the more simple and elementary observations of physical figures. — Giuseppe Peano

Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else's intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world. — Karen Joy Fowler

Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself. — Igor Stravinsky

Since I invoke Torah so often, let me state that I don't personally believe in the God it postulates ... I am not religious, nor were the majority of the early builders of Israel believers. Yet their passion for this land stemmed from the Book of Books ... [The Bible is] the single most important book in my life. — David Ben-Gurion

Science has faith. We make postulates. We can't prove those postulates, but we have faith in them. — Charles H. Townes

Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen he's perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded. But you've got to stick to one set of postulates. You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. — Aldous Huxley

The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted. — Franz Rottensteiner

Science can have no quarrel with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are His children. — Arthur Compton

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason
if you pick the proper postulates. — Isaac Asimov

Twentieth-century physics, going full circle back to Heracleitus, postulates that all matter is in motion. In other words, there is no thing, only energy. — Camille Paglia

That small freckle postulates a grin on my face:
see to it that midnight reeks insomniac on your eyes;
I turn the pillow upside down to not smell my breath again
Is there, aside from my memory, for you a better place? — Ashfaq Saraf

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained. — George Bernard Shaw

Theron's rather inchoate manuscript Strange Stone postulates that both fortress and seat might be the work of a queer, misshapen race of half men sired by creatures of the salt seas upon human women. These Deep Ones, as he names them, are the seed from which our legends of merlings have grown, he argues, whilst their terrible fathers are the truth behind the Drowned God of the ironborn. — George R R Martin

Man's passion for truth is such that he will welcome the bitterest of all postulates so long as it strikes him as true. — Antonio Machado

The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any. — Thomas Henry Huxley

If diphtheria is a disease caused by a microorganism, it is essential that three postulates be fulfilled. The fulfilment of these postulates is necessary in order to demonstrate strictly the parasitic nature of a disease:
1) The organism must be shown to be constantly present in characteristic form and arrangement in the diseased tissue.
2) The organism which, from its behaviour appears to be responsible for the disease, must be isolated and grown in pure culture.
3) The pure culture must be shown to induce the disease experimentally.
An early statement of Koch's postulates. — Friedrich Loeffler

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. — Max Planck

If somebody postulates the existence of more than one god, I would have to say we don't worship the same god. If somebody says that God is basically one with the world, I would also have to say we don't worship the same god. — Miroslav Volf