Powerful Theories Quotes & Sayings

Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it. — Susan Sontag

There is an old maxim that says that two empires that are too large will collapse. The analog in set theory is that two different theories that are too powerful must necessarily contradict each other. — Saharon Shelah

You're the bright spot in my day. — Autumn Doughton

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. "You've heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?" he says. "Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience." By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation. — Chip Heath

I think one of the reasons that we like conspiracy theories is I think that we like to feel like there is a group of people who are so smart and powerful that they can pull the wool over an entire country or in fact even an entire world's eyes. That certainly makes us feel like somehow we're protected, even if it's not in our best interest. — Jason Ritter

People think that the destructive theories that nowadays go by the name "socialism" are of recent origin. This is a mistake: these theories were contemporaneous with the first Economists. While they employed the all-powerful government of their dreams as an instrument to change the forms of society, socialists imagined seizing the same power to undermine its base. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Some people leave, yeah, and it sucks. But some people don't leave, and they never will. And sometimes people are there, but you just can't see them. But they're still there. — Robin Benway

I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden. — Deirdre Madden

We all face difficulties of our own, and how comforting it is to immerse yourself in a book - my book, any book, any romance. It's entertainment, it's escape, and it can even be an inspiration! — Debbie Macomber

[T]ruly grand and powerful theories [ ... ] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. [ ... ] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo . You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly. — Stephen Jay Gould

It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes. — Leo Tolstoy

The fact that lately some circles, not less powerful by their small size, have been actively promoting certain theories, as dangerous as they are illusory, of a "limited", "winnable" or "protracted" nuclear war, as well as their obsession of "nuclear superiority", make it advisable to bear always in mind that the immediate goal of all States, as was expressly declared in the Final Document of the Special Assembly of 1978, "is that of the elimination of the danger of a nuclear war" — Alfonso Garcia Robles

Conspiracy theories - feverishly creative, lovingly plotted - are in fact fictional stories that some people believe. Conspiracy theorists connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination - yes, perhaps even your imagination - not despite structural parallels with fiction, but in large part because of them. They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment. — Jonathan Gottschall

What delights, what pleasures does your life offer you that outweigh the raptures of death? — Novalis

A new concept of god: something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature ... that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow ... Mars ... the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. — Carl Sagan

I shall not fear to say that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me of all the philosophic theories the most appropriate to the needs of men in our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee against themselves that remains to them. The minds of the moralists of our day ought to turn, therefore, principally toward it. Even should they judge it imperfect, they would still have to adopt it as necessary. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Science is not 'organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition. — Stephen Jay Gould

When you mix fashion and politics, you get fascism. Politics have fashion, and it's bad; fashion has politics, that are ugly. — Nate Lowman

...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.

US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way... — Rosa Brooks