Right Theory Quotes & Sayings

Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man! — Milton Friedman

Do you think that sometimes, there are those that are meant to be together?" he asked, not breaking his gaze.
I thought for a moment. "I don't know, maybe." I shrugged.
"What if, there are two parts that were once a whole. Not here on earth, but," he looked skyward, then at me again with those searing golden eyes. A slight, nervous smile crept up my right cheek. He continued, "And those two parts weren't what made them whole, but the parts of them did."
"You've lost me now," I said, as I loosened my grip on his embrace, shaking my head.
"I'm talking about soul mates. Split aparts. It's a theory of Plato's. Except, what if the split aparts were never one, but each split apart was a part of one that was once whole? — Tania Penn

Eleanor had a long-held theory about men. She truly believed that for most men, all that talk of "being in love" or "finding the right one" was absolute nonsense. Marriage was purely a matter of timing, and whenever a man was finally done sowing his wild oats and ready to settle down, whichever girl happened to be there at the time would be the right one. — Kevin Kwan

Paige, the way you just stood up and left like that, I was awful proud of you. Really, you're stronger than you let on." She sighed. "I should've stood up and left sooner. I was real close." "Me, too," he said. "I think maybe we tried too hard with Bud. Both of us. He always act like that?" "When he's not real quiet and sulky." "He get along with Wes okay?" Preacher asked. "Bud thinks Wes is awesome. Because he thinks Wes is rich. Wes thinks Bud's an idiot." "Hmm." Preacher contemplated. He didn't let go of her hand. "You think Bud really believes it would be all right to get your head bashed in a few times a year for six thousand square feet and a pool?" "I believe he does," she said. "I really believe he does." "Hmm. Think he'd like to move into my big house - test that theory?" She laughed. "Do you have a big house somewhere, John?" "Not at the moment." He shrugged. "But for Bud, I'd be willing to look around." * — Robyn Carr

A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats. — Walter Lippmann

The orchid hypothesis by David Dobbs in a wonderful article in The Atlantic. This theory holds that many children are like dandelions, able to thrive in just about any environment. But others, including the high-reactive types that Kagan studied, are more like orchids: they wilt easily, but under the right conditions can grow strong and magnificent. — Susan Cain

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns. — Tom Spanbauer

If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake. — Brian Greene

Indeed, as string theory was understood better, it became clear that the gauge interactions naturally emerged from it. But even more than this, during their period of exile from the mainstream, the string theorists realized that their theory naturally gave rise to an interaction that had all of the hallmarks of the gravitational force. In order to get the force to come out with the right strength, all they had to do was fix the length of the string to be about the Planck length. Thus, string theory had the potential to unify all of physics in a simple framework, in which all phenomena arise from the motion and vibrations of fundamental one-dimensional strings. — Lee Smolin

All right," Malcolm said. "Let's go back to the beginning." He paused, staring at the ceiling. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We've been doing it for hundreds of years." "Okay," Gennaro said. "But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're hard to solve - in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory. — Michael Crichton

Professor Ramachandran believes this synesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synesthetic small i sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: Little, teeny, petite, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right, then language emerged from the vast array of synesthetic connections in the human brain. — Daniel Tammet

Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule. — Robert K. Merton

You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying you are free to compete with all the others, and still justly believe you have been completely fair ... We seek not just freedom but opportunity ... not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result. — Lyndon B. Johnson

You know how I feel about Occam's Razor. The simplest answer isn't usually the right one. Devious and unlikely is everywhere.' 'You ought to launch your own theory: Occam's Beard, you could call it. — Sophie Hannah

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The Theory of Surplus Value means that anytime you hire someone, you are exploiting him. If you pay someone to fix your automobile, he has the right, by virtue of being your mechanic, to steal your car. — P. J. O'Rourke

Outside the train, the world went by, and somewhere above him in the sky, a plane flew away, and objects in motion would stay in motion, and objects at rest would stay at rest. Isaac Newton -- the real one, the one Isaac had been named after -- had figured out that law, and a law wasn't a theory, it was a law. The air Rick had breathed out was still in Isaac's apartment, and the sheets still smelled like him, and there were little parts of him everywhere, and someday he'd come home, and against the great scale of universal time, a few months wasn't long at all. Before Isaac even knew it, they'd be together. The train would rock its way down the tracks and Rick's airplane would fly west and the planet would rotate and the solar system would turn and the galaxy would spin and the universe would keep on expanding, and with enough time, everything in it would again be made right. — Shukyou

I had faith in the concept and the theory that all Americans are endowed with the right to a fair trial and I would be fairly judged and fairly tried. — Wesley Snipes

...a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang 'will be found to be false'. — Peter Watson

Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing. — Niall Ferguson

We had an episode where Bud asks his dad, I was named after the beer, right, Dad? And Ed ONeill, who played my dad, says, Uh ... Right, son! My theory is that Bud Bundy was named after marijuana. — David Faustino

Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle. — G.K. Chesterton

Everyone can err, but Stalin considered that he never erred, that he was always right. He never acknowledged to anyone that he made any mistake, large or small, despite the fact that he made not a few mistakes in the matter of theory and in his practical activity. — Nikita Khrushchev

I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based-on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart. — Leo Tolstoy

GREG ANNOUNCES HIS RESEARCH AS TO WHAT IS GOING ON:
'Alright I have a theory " he announced rejoining us and taking a healthy slug of scotch himself. "And if I'm right we're going to need more booze. And more ammo. And maybe an extra priest. — John G. Hartness

Don't ever let anyone tell you that history doesn't repeat. For 70 years, liberals have been spinning the yarn that FDR's New Deal, despite all the evidence that it exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression, quickened our economic recovery. Indeed, I remember scratching my head when one of my college history professors in the 1970s tried to convince us of that theory and its corollary - an even better howler - that FDR was actually a conservative, because if he hadn't implemented his socialist programs, the republic would have died right there. — David Limbaugh

At first view it might seem not to square with the republican theory, to suppose either that a majority have not the right, or that a minority will have the force to subvert a government ... But theoretic reasoning in this, as in most other cases, must be qualified by the lessons of practice. — James Madison

I realized that, all along, my theory was right: Make music that you want to hear, and instead of having fans that one day might criticize or abandon you, your fans aren't even fans. They're people with tastes similar to yours. They're friends you haven't met yet. — Natalia Kills

I am not well-versed in theory, but in my view, the cow deserves her life. As does the ram. As does the ladybug. As does the elephant. As do the fish, and the dog and the bee; as do other sentient beings. I will always be in favor of veganism as a minimum because I believe that sentient beings have a right not to be used as someone else's property. They ask us to be brave for them, to be clear for them, and I see no other acceptable choice but to advocate veganism. If these statements make me a fundamentalist, then I will sew a scarlet F on my jacket so that all may know I'm fundamentally in favor of nonviolence; may they bury me in it so that all will know where I stood. — Vincent J. Guihan

According to Krishnamacharya , practice and knowledge must always go together. He used to say, practice without right knowledge of theory is blind. This is also because without right knowledge, one can mindfully do a wrong practice. — A. G. Mohan

I believe, if there is some sort of higher power, the universe is it. Whenever religious people ask me where the universe came from, I tell them that it has always been here, and was never created. The Big Bang theory is based on the fact that the universe is expanding right now. And if you rewind the tape, the universe appears to be shrinking. If you rewind the tape far enough, eventually the universe must be just one singular point. Or so the theory goes. But what if the universe has not always been expanding? What if it's pulsating, and one pulse takes trillions of years, and right now the universe is inhaling, and before that, trillions of years ago, it was exhaling? — Oliver Gaspirtz

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway. — George Saunders

TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE ...
I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think ...
You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON - WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.
- Theory of Religion — Georges Bataille

As Donald Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 he was asked, "Have you ever asked God for forgiveness?" He replied, "I'm not sure I have. I just go and try and do a better job from there. . . . If I do something wrong, I think I just try to make it right. I don't bring God into that picture. I don't."1 He created quite a stir among many religious people, so he tempered the comments a few days later. But I think he was being honest, and his comments reflect the way many people feel: in theory they believe in the forgiveness of sins, but the concept doesn't really apply to them. Standing in stark contrast to this view is one articulated by twentieth-century existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, who once said, "Forgiveness is an answer, the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence."2 — Adam Hamilton

Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right. — John Maynard Keynes

The theory of animal rights simply is not consistent with the theory of animal welfare ... Animal rights means dramatic social changes for humans and non-humans alike; if our bourgeois values prevent us from accepting those changes, then we have no right to call ourselves advocates of animal rights. — Gary L. Francione

The Astronomy theory paper on Wednesday morning went well enough. Harry was not convinced he had got the names of all Jupiter's moons right, but was at least confident that none of them was inhabited by mice. They had to wait until evening for their practical Astronomy; the afternoon was devoted instead to Divination. — J.K. Rowling

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

A theory has only the alternative of being right or wrong. A model has a third possibility: it may be right, but irrelevant. — Manfred Eigen

Here some one thrust these cards into these old hands of mine, swears that I must play them, and no others. And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right, live in the game, and die in it. — Herman Melville

In the book, I make the point that here we have string theory and here we have twistor theory and we don't know if either one of them is the right approach to nature. — Roger Penrose

The first issue to be settled is whether socialism has a right to exist Are its allegations concerning the present system true? Is industry proceeding on a principle of fraud? I wish to test the power of recent economic theory to give an exact answer to this question. — John Bates Clark

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic. — Garet Garrett

What, then, is light according to the electromagnetic theory? It consists of alternate and opposite rapidly recurring transverse magnetic disturbances, accompanied with electric displacements, the direction of the electric displacement being at the right angles to the magnetic disturbance, and both at right angles to the direction of the ray. — James Clerk Maxwell

Despite my deep unease about animal advocates working for things we don't want and asking for changes we don't believe in, I am not an "abolitionist." First, the abolition of animal slavery will no more end speciesism by itself than the abolition of American slavery ended racism. To change the world, I think we should aim higher. Second, I'm increasingly convinced that no matter who uses the term, it hides a slur. When used to refer to others, it connotes zealotry and obstructionism, and when taken as self-definition, it is seen as an attack by anyone who does not apply it to herself. Yes, it's a highly defensible moral philosophy, right up there with Peter Singer's application of Utilitarianism to animal liberation, and Tom Regan's Theory of Rights, but like those other intellectual concepts, it's useful only so far as it engenders right action. — Sarahjane Blum

I had a great deal of independence from the president and the White House during the entirety of my five years. And I'm not sure exactly what that is, but our friend, Walter Dellinger, has a theory about it, and I think he's probably right. And the theory starts with the fact that I worked in the White House for a year and a half before coming over to the position of SG. And because of that, when I was nominated, there was some chatter out there that, "Oh. They're putting a political hack in. This has never happened before." — Donald Verrilli Jr.

I traveled a good deal all over the world, and I got along pretty good in all these foreign countries, for I have a theory that it's their country and they got a right to run it like they want to. — Will Rogers

We see many persons talking the most wonderfully fine things about charity and about equality and the rights of other people and all that, but it is only in theory. I was so fortunate as to find one who was able to carry theory into practice. He had the most wonderful faculty of carrying everything into practice which he thought was right. — Swami Vivekananda

Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like ... We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy. Right practice rather then right belief. That's all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it's not important in the way you think. It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. — Hyam Maccoby

Beth had been both wrong and right. Echo couldn't hurt anyone, especially when she seemed so breakable herself. But the need I felt to be the one to keep the world from shattering her only confirmed Beth's theory. I was falling for her and I was fucked. — Katie McGarry

So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete. In — Bill Bryson

I have a theory that you get the right dog, the dog you need, for a particular stage in your life. — Meg Donohue

Property breeds lawyers, I said, forbearing to add a belief that unfortunately property now seemed the only thing palpable enough to demand the respect of governments, and perhaps was the generating clout against encroachments on the spiritual protections for speech, assembly, and so on. It might turn out that without the right to possess we are not sure we really have the right to speak and to be. — Arthur Miller

For me, there isn't some miracle cure, this is my life, or my disease will progress and my life will change focus again, and I'll have another new life.
I need C to stay right where he is now because for now, I don't know enough to move from where I am.
My hypothesis is that the light will come back, both outside and inside me.
I'm afraid and angry, but the light is a theory I want to prove.
Until then, I just have to keep the experiment going with as many controls as possible.
One bus, back and forth.
One store.
One man, his words under glass. — Mary Ann Rivers

Have you ever heard about string theory? Everything is tied together, works together, shrinks, expands, and breathes together. Maybe we're on the same string, baby. We're right beside each other. We're the same thing." His mouth takes mine. He pulls away. "My blood, your blood..." Another kiss...his voice hot on my cheek. "One day I tried to calculate the odds of how we met. The odds of February 14. There are no odds. For us, there are no odds because it isn't chance." - Kellan — Ella James

There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were. — Charles Bukowski

it is said 'thou shalt not kill,' is he to be killed because he murdered some one else? No, it is not right, it's an impossible theory. I — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

we should also consider the remoter analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals, especially the carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory of marriage. If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were almost animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to argue from what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to the civilized man. The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary, - the connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of social life is still more fragmentary and precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly unknown to us. Such — Plato

Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions - so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all? — Stephen Hawking

The logic of all this seems to be that it is all right for young people in a democracy to learn about any civilization or social theory that is not dangerous, but that they should remain entirely ignorant of any civilization or social theory that might be dangerous on the ground that what you don't know can't hurt you ... a complete denial of the democratic principle that the general diffusion of knowledge and learning through the community is essential to the preservation of free government. — Carl L. Becker

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong. — H.L. Mencken

The new "theory of justice" demands that men counteract the "injustice" of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive "those favored by nature" (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life) - and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with. — Ayn Rand

The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible has no right here to any answer. He must be referred for conviction to the body of this treatise. And he can hardly refuse to go there, since he himself has, perhaps unknowingly, entered the arena. He is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles. — F.H. Bradley

During Darwin's lifetime, most working scientists came around to the view that evolution is a fact, but they argued about the importance of natural selection. One hundred and fifty years later, it has turned out that Darwin was essentially right on both counts, but his theory of natural selection left out a lot of details. Those details are still a subject of active research. There is no research, however, about whether evolution happens. That issue was settled over a century ago and is no longer an interesting scientific question. — Alan R. Rogers

At very best there are two problems with ideology. The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality. It is a straight-edge ruler of a fractal universe. And the second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault here lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary. To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and of those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction. — Marilynne Robinson

There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules ... intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory ... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? ... Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo? — Alasdair MacIntyre

There is a great deal of emotional satisfaction in the elegant demonstration, in the elegant ordering of facts into theories, and in the still more satisfactory, still more emotionally exciting discovery that the theory is not quite right and has to be worked over again, very much as any other work of art-a painting, a sculpture has to be worked over in the interests of aesthetic perfection. So there is no scientist who is not to some extent worthy of being described as artist or poet. — Robert Watson-Watt

But this does not detract from the wisdom of his faith in the people and his constant insistence that they be left to manage their own affairs. His opposition to bureaucracy will bear careful analysis, and the country could stand a great deal more of its application. The trouble with us is that we talk about Jefferson but do not follow him. In his theory that the people should manage their government, and not be managed by it, he was everlastingly right. — Calvin Coolidge

I've concluded that getting the categories right is an absolutely crucial step to building useful management theory, and unfortunately too few writers do this. You've got to engage in serious scholarship, and then figure out how to write it in a way that lots of people can understand. — Clayton Christensen

You said, 'Why do I frighten you?'
Frighten me? Yes you do frighten me. You act as though we will be together for ever. You act as though there is infinite pleasure and time without end. How can I know that? My experience has been that time always ends. In theory you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the romantics and the religious are right. — Jeanette Winterson

[The theory of universal gravitation] is not cast-iron. No theory is, and there is always room for improvement. Isn't that so? Science is constructed out of approximations that gradually approach the truth ... Well, that means all theories are subject to constant testing and modification, doesn't it? And if it eventually turns out that they're not quite close enough to the truth, they need to be replaced by something that's closer. Right? — Isaac Asimov

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.'
And?'
Chaos theory throws it right out the window. — Michael Crichton

All that was speculation, and a man can get carried away by a reasonable theory. Often a man finds a theory that explains things and he builds atop that theory, finding all the right answers ... only the basic theory is wrong. But that's the last thing he will want to admit. — Louis L'Amour

Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. — Joseph Goebbels

It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience. — Peter Ackroyd

The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history. — Steven Pinker

The primary rule of business success is loyalty to your employer. That's all right as a theory. What is the matter with loyalty to yourself? — Mark Twain

He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so. He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone. Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp.
...
He wasn't quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth. The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations...The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.

Or had he been bluffing himself? — Ursula K. Le Guin

The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions. — Ernst Mayr

It is Jill's theory that in every life there is one dog.Other dogs may come and go, but there is one grande affaire. I feel that is probably right and yet it worries me, for it might mean that I am a fickle person. For I seem able to love deeply just the dog I am looking at. — Gladys Taber

Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. If men differed in their interpretation, there was no divinely appointed authority to decide the dispute. In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God. — Bertrand Russell

She had a theory that you should try to fill your life with people with wrinkles next to their eyes because it means they've got it right; they've lived and laughed ... — Susan Fletcher

That theory will be blown when she's conferring with the event security, wearing an earpiece and holstering a firearm under her business suit. Or if she perceives a threat and pulls a gun, because she - and no offense, sweetheart - looks awful trigger-happy."
She set her forearms on the table. "You have no idea how true that statement is. But right now the person I'd be gunning for most is you, sweetheart." Then she smiled.
Holy shit. The smile completely transformed her face - but Devin wasn't sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing because the grin straddled the line between sexy and evil. — Lorelei James

The situation today is, we haven't got a good model to explain partial reflection by two surfaces; we just calculate the probability that a particular photomultiplier will be hit by a photon reflected from a sheet of glass. I have chosen this calculation as our first example of the method provided by theory of quantum electrodynamics. I am going to show you "how we count the beans"-what the physicists do to get the right answer. I am not going to explain how the photons actually "decide" whether to bounce back or go through; that is not known. (Probably the question has no meaning.) I will only show you how to calculate the correct probability that light will be reflected from glass of a given thickness, because that's the only thing physicists know how to do! What we do to get the answer to this problem is analogous to the things we have to do to get the answer to every other problem explained by quantum electrodynamics. — Richard Feynman

As to the reserved and withdrawn areas, excluding and excepting only the national parks, it is manifest that justice, equality, and dignity for these States require that ultimately all should be ceded to the States wherein they lie. The theory that the Western States can not intelligently and wisely administer these areas, for example, the forest reserves, is based on the delinquencies and wastefulness of the States to the eastward which had their resources and their opportunity, and in some cases, as States, misused and abused their rights. This constitutes no reason as to why the same right which they enjoyed should be denied to the Western states. — Charles Edwin Winter

Vortices of pure energy can exist and, if my theories are right, can compose the bodily form of an intelligent species. — Lord Kelvin

Nothing is known in our profession by guess; and I do not believe, that from the first dawn of medical science to the present moment, a single correct idea has ever emanated from conjecture: it is right therefore, that those who are studying their profession should be aware that there is no short road to knowledge; and that observation on the diseased living, examination of the dead, and experiments upon living animals, are the only sources of true knowledge; and that inductions from these are the sole bases of legitimate theory. — Astley Cooper

When we encounter unexpected obstacles in finding out something which we wish to know, there are two possible courses to take. It may be that the right course is to treat the obstacle as a spur to further efforts; but there is a second possibility - that we have been trying to find something which does not exist. You will remember that that was how the relativity theory accounted for the apparent concealment of our velocity through the aether. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

A lot of my role is advocacy, and as a scientist, you're an advocate, too, because you are coming up with a theory and having to convince your fellow scientists that you're right. — Ellen Stofan

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns. — Paul Sabatier

Under unitary executive theory, the [George W.]Bush administration has claimed the right to seize American citizens in the United States and imprison them indefinitely without a charge. — Dick Durbin

The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes. It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches. For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift. All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. — Brennan Manning

We are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude ... it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God's will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can s - can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.
Now, I'm obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. — Sam Harris

Pfuel was one of those theorists who love their theory so dearly they lose sight of the aim of all theory, which is to work out in practice. He was so much in love with theory that he hated all practice and didn't want to know about it. He positively rejoiced in failure, because failure was due to practical infringements of his theory, which went to show how right the theory was. — Leo Tolstoy

People say I don't have great tools. They say that I can't throw like Ellis Valentine or run like Tim Raines or hit with power like Mike Schmidt. Who can? I make up for it in other ways, by putting out a little bit more. That's my theory, to go through life hustling. In the big leagues, hustle usually means being in the right place at the right time. It means backing up a base. It means backing up your teammate. It means taking that headfirst slide. It means doing everything you can do to win a baseball game. — Pete Rose

Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat. — Gregory Benford

If you read the books then you have no conclusion you do not dare to kick out this idea or theory "wrong", this idea or theory "right", if you have no conclusion from what you read, your reading is not useful. — Khem Veasna

You think I like this?" I say defensively. "Trust me, I don't need this headache in my life." I swallow a mouthful of beer. "Hey. You know Twilight?" He blinks. "Excuse me?" "Twilight. The vampire book." His wary eyes study my face. "What about it?" "Okay, so you know how Bella's blood is extra special? Like how it gives Edward a raging boner every time he's around her?" "Are you fucking with me right now?" I ignore that. "Do you think it happens in real life? Pheromones and all that crap. Is it a bullshit theory some horndog dreamed up so he could justify why he's attracted to his mother or some shit? Or is there actually a biological reason why we're drawn to certain people? Like goddamn Twilight. Edward wants her on a biological level, right?" "Are you seriously dissecting Twilight right now?" God, I am. This is what Allie has reduced me to. A sad, pathetic loser who goes to a bar and forces his friend to participate in a Twilight book club. — Elle Kennedy

My theory is children don't do what you tell them to do, they do what you do. You have to always do the right thing because they follow you. — Boman Irani

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