Quotes & Sayings About Thesis

A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.) — Ron Chernow

Always remembering that we might be wrong, we must contemplate alternatives, concoct hedges, and search vigilantly for validation of our assessments. We always sell when a security's price begins to reflect full value, because we are never sure that our thesis will be precisely correct. — Seth Klarman

The great novelists are philosophical novelists
that is, the contrary of thesis-writers. — Albert Camus

Novels with a "thesis" don't interest me. They just don't - novels that want to "show" something, that want to "argue" something specific. I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. — Sergio Chejfec

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner. — Antonya Nelson

The average PhD thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one gaveyard to another. — J. Frank Dobie

Similarly the call to growth can be conceptualized as personal (a daimon or genius, an angel or a muse) or as impersonal, like the tides or the transiting of Venus. Either way works, as long as we're comfortable with it. Or if extra-dimensionality doesn't sit well with you in any form, think of it as "talent," programmed into our genes by evolution. The point, for the thesis I'm seeking to put forward, is that there are forces we can call our allies. As Resistance works to keep us from becoming who we were born to be, equal and opposite powers are counterpoised against it. These are our allies and angels. — Steven Pressfield

I have strengths, and I have weaknesses. I don't pretend to be able to write a great thesis or doctorate - I have no pretensions in that direction. — Bob Ainsworth

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It is significant that, as innocent babies are killed, and capital punishment is withheld from their murderers, the same men who plead for the murderer's life also demand the "right" to abortion. Usually, the same picketers that carry a sign one day, "Abolish Capital Punishment," also carry "Legalize Abortion" another day. When this is called to their attention, their answer is, "There is no contradiction involved." They are right: the thesis is "condemn the innocent and free the guilty. — Rousas John Rushdoony

It is a central thesis of this book that centralization has reached diminishing returns and is no longer yielding any benefit. Instead, it has become the problem, not the solution; what worked in the past no longer works now. Centralization as a solution has been leapfrogged by decentralizing technologies. — Charles Hugh Smith

The evolutionist thesis has become more stringently unthinkable than ever before. — Wolfgang Smith

One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation. — Jan Swafford

And this thesis is somewhat connected with general social and political observations, because it establishes the fact that the number of consumers is considerably larger than the number of producers, a fact which exercises a not inconsiderable social and political pressure. — Hjalmar Schacht

Yo! You're my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I'd have asked for it, Motherfucker! — Mark Leyner

The thesis that the living creatures have always been composed different species was established in a time where no sufficient observations had been made and when science hardly existed. This thesis is denied every day by those who have made accurate observations, who have long time observed nature and who have had the benefit from studying our musei's large and rich collections. — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe. — Frederick C. Beiser

My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ. — William A. Dembski

The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional. — Clifford Allbutt

I don't subscribe to the thesis, 'Let the buyer beware,' I prefer the disregarded one that goes, 'Let the seller be honest.' — Isaac Asimov

The best movies have one sentence that they're exploring, a thesis, something that people can argue about over dinner afterward. — Helen Hunt

Prof. Emi Ito said "Lailah, if you can't explain the scientific observations in a simple sentence, it means you do not know enough. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The thesis of etatism that the members of the government and its assistants are more intelligent than the people, and that they know better what is good for the individual than he himself knows, is pure nonsense. — Ludwig Von Mises

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing. — Megan Abbott

In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements. — Marie Curie

She bops around really energetically but she's also still. Like she's moving her torso but her feet don't move, and then sometimes she'll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement. Like it is a topic sentence about her butt. — Aimee Bender

My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past. — G.K. Chesterton

Truth is found neither in Marxism nor in traditional capitalism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise, and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth century capitalism failed to see that life is social and Marxism failed and still fails to see that life is individual and personal. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Me: Morning. How's the thesis coming along?

Maggie: Do you want me to sugar-coat it, or are you honestly giving me an opening to vent?

Me: Wide open. Vent away.

Maggie: I'm miserable, Ridge. I hate it. I work on it for hours every day, and I just want to take a bat to my computer and go all Office Space on it. If this thesis were a child, I'd put it up for adoption and not even think twice about it. If this thesis were a cute, fuzzy puppy, I'd drop it off in the middle of a busy intersection and speed away.

Me: And then you would do a U-turn and go back and pick it up and play with it all night. — Colleen Hoover

In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I've lived to see my lost causes found. — Pauli Murray

Uncle alone in the house with the children said he'd dress up to amuse them. After a long wait, as he did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man putting the table silver into a bag. 'Oh, Uncle,' they cried in delight. 'Yes, isn't my make-up good?' said Uncle, taking his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism of humour. Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the children); antithesis: it WAS a burglar (a laugh for the reader); synthesis: it still was Uncle (fooling the reader). — Vladimir Nabokov

Antinomy, that is, the existence of two laws or tendencies which are opposed to each other, is possible, not only with two different things, but with one and the same thing. Considered in their thesis, that is, in the law or tendency which created them, all the economical categories are rational, - competition, monopoly, the balance of trade, and property, as well as the division of labor, machinery, taxation, and credit. But, like communism and population, all these categories are antinomical; all are opposed, not only to each other, but to themselves. All is opposition, and disorder is born of this system of opposition. Hence, the sub-title of the work, - "Philosophy of Misery." No category can be suppressed; the opposition, antinomy, or contre-tendance, which exists in each of them, cannot be suppressed. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I am suggesting here that organisms have a built-I capability of adapting to their environment. I am suggesting that to the extent that evolution occurs, it occurs at the level of the organism. This suggestion differs sharply from the thesis of the NDT, which holds that evolution occurs only at the level of the population. Organisms contain within themselves the information that enables them to develop a phenotype adaptive to a variety of environments. The adaptation can occur by a change in the genome through a genetic change triggered by the environment, or it can occur without any genetic change. — Lee Spetner

Now a great debate has been born. The thesis is Democratic Socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism. The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It is now up to the Republicans to pick it up and fight along these lines. — Dick Morris

I'm a doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit ... when you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis. — Kurt Vonnegut

Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonism that abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument in favor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find in poetry numerous documents of the intense life of language. — Gaston Bachelard

The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism — Martin Luther King Jr.

Well the basic thesis is that there's a god in heaven who is all powerful who wants to help people. And that - he will answer prayer, and does miraculous things in people's lives. And so I've documented some of these wonderful things. — Pat Robertson

Thus the Stoics arrive at their main thesis. Virtue alone is admirable, virtue is absolutely self-sufficient; the good man needs no help from circumstances, neither sickness nor adversity can harm him; he is a king, a god among men. — Marcus Aurelius

At the heart of his paper was the notion that fairy tales relieved us of our need for order and allowed us impossible, irrational desires. Magic was real, that was his thesis. This thesis was at the very center of chaos theory - if the tiniest of actions reverberated throughout the universe in invisible and unexpected ways, changing the weather and the climate, then anything was possible. The girl who sleeps for a hundred years does so because of a single choice to thread a needle. The golden ball that falls down the well rattles the world, changing everything. The bird that drops a feather, the butterfly that moves its wings, all of it drifts across the universe, through the woods, to the other side of the mountain. The dust you breathe in was once breathed out. The person you are, the weather around you, all of it a spell you can't understand or explain. — Alice Hoffman

I call this theory mystical pluralism because of its similarity to John Hick's pluralist interpretation of religion. The theory is essentialist in both the therapeutic and epistemological senses described above. Its thesis is that mystical traditions initiate common transformative processes in the consciousness of mystics. Though mystical doctrines and practices may be quite different across traditions, they nevertheless function in parallel ways - they disrupt the processes of mind that maintain ordinary, egocentric experience and induce a structural transformation of consciousness. The essential characteristic of this transformation is an increasingly sensitized awareness/knowledge of Reality that manifests as (among other things) an enhanced sense of emotional well-being, an expanded locus of concern engendering greater compassion for others, an enhanced capacity to creatively negotiate one's environment, and a greater capacity for aesthetic appreciation. — Randall Studstill

A thesis has to be presentable ... but don't attach too much importance to it. If you do succeed in the sciences, you will do later on better things and then it will be of little moment. If you don't succeed in the sciences, it doesn't matter at all. — Paul Ehrenfest

Without moral values, which should begin in Congress, America will lose her roots, her basis, her thesis. — Janine Turner

A dangerous thesis has taken hold among many in the GOP: that it might be better to lose the '06 election and re-group. In American history, when a faction in the majority party decides the party is tired and could benefit from some time in the wilderness, the voters usually oblige. Most recently, the latest issue of Washington Monthly includes a cover story [link] featuring seven such articles from prominent Republican strategists, insiders and commentators. — Larry Sabato

There is no such thing as a parttime partisan. Real partisans are partisans always and as long as they live. They put fallen governments back in power and overthrow governments that have just been put in power with the help of partisans. Mr Matzerath contended - and his thesis struck me as perfectly plausible - that among all those who go in for politics your incorrigible partisan, who undermines what he has just set up, is closest to the artist because he consistently rejects what he has just set up. — Gunter Grass

When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. — Steven Pinker

Every scholarly history that was written before 1920 was written by a man who had been taught by a man, whose thesis would be examined by a man, and whose book would be published by a male publisher and reviewed by a male critic. This could not change until women were admitted to universities and colleges. When women could train as historians in the universities, they could for the first time research, write, and publish scholarly history. — Philippa Gregory

An emulation operating at a speed of ten thousand times that of a biological brain would be able to read a book in a few seconds and write a PhD thesis in an afternoon. — Nick Bostrom

In the end, you won't remember much beyond those final all-nighters, the gauche inside joke that sullies an acknowledgments page that only four human beings will ever read, the awkward photograph with your advisor at graduation. All that remains might be the sensation of handing your thesis to someone in the departmental office and then walking into a possibility-rich, almost-summer afternoon. It will be difficult to forget. — Anonymous

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modified the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiquity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra-epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap forwards. — Peter Sloterdijk

The great march of metal destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is the reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. — G.K. Chesterton

I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison. — James Cronin

Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it's a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it's fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that's about it. I don't even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn't say whether I liked the book or not. — Joshua Foer

Critics of American colleges typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities. — Derek Bok

In Plato's time, dialectics was a debating technique subject to precise rules. A "thesis" was proposed-an interrogative proposition such as: Can virtue be taught? One of the two interlocutors attacked the thesis; the other defended it. The former attacked by interrogating-that is, he asked the defender skillfully chosen questions with the aim of forcing him to admit the contradictory of the thesis he wanted to defend. The interrogator had no thesis, and this was why Socrates was in the habit of playing that role. — Pierre Hadot

His argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. — Anonymous

I was beginning to agree with the thesis that some truths were better off dead.
And buried. — Simona Panova

It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are space ships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our Earth for centuries. I think that they possibly have been sent out to conduct systematic, long-range investigations, first of men, animals, vegetation, and more recently of atomic centers, armaments an centers of armament production. — Hermann Oberth

Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble ... truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The mass media stereotype of an MPD patient is a woman harboring an internal collection of delightfully different people ranging from wide-eyed little kids to kung fu masters and nuclear physicists. Skeptics tend to focus concretely on the impossibility of there being 10 or 20 or 100 separate people inside that woman's body (e.g., Sarbin, 1995). By and large, this stereotype will not go away.

Alter personalities are real. They do exist - not as separate, individuals, but as discrete dissociative states of consciousness. When considered from this perspective, they are not nearly so amazing to behold or so difficult to accept. A fair reading of the MPD literature shows that authorities have long subscribed to this thesis: "Only when taken together can all of the personality states be considered a whole personality" (Coons, 1984, p. 53). Paradoxically, it is the critics who implicitly accept the view that the alter personalities are separate people. — Frank W. Putnam

I think if somebody is so set in their ways about what they feel about something - and you get this a lot in academia, of course, and also different sorts of journalism too - you're going to sweep under the carpet the facts that don't suit your thesis. And I think that happens quite a lot in the courtroom, for instance. — Jon Ronson

I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school. — Carrie Coon

This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?" — Bob Brookmeyer

You should have an investment thesis that essentially says why you think this is potentially a good idea. — Reid Hoffman

[Mark] Epprecht's larger thesis [...] is that Europeans introduced homophobia, not homosexuality, to Africa. — Chantal Zabus

McDougall does not dispute the thesis as to
the collective inhibition of intelligence in groups
(p. 41). He says that the minds of lower intelligence
bring down those of a higher order to their own
level. The latter are obstructed in their activity,
because in general an intensification of emotion
creates unfavourable conditions for sound intellectual
work, and further because the individuals are intimidated
by the group and their mental activity is
not free, and because there is a lowering in each
individual of his sense of responsibility for his own
performances. — Sigmund Freud

If he weren't currently in the back of a cop car, he would have wanted to make a thesis note. — V.E Schwab

It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right. — George F. Kennan

Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasized that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons' threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. — Alain De Botton

Those three years ended with June 1933. At that time I left Princeton, having submitted my Ph.D. thesis. — Stephen Cole Kleene

Oh, so suddenly you're an expert in crazy?" "After meeting you, I feel I could write a thesis on the subject, — J.L. Weil

I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, because I think that even though something grotesque or gross has been part of film since way back, what we accept or what we can get away with on the screen is broader now. — Ivan Reitman

I read a book recently by a psychiatrist who was able to interview a few serial killers and she had a thesis on how you could figure these people out. And she thinks that there are things that could tell you whether someone has the potential to do that. — Tom Araya

My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. — C. G. Jung

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis. — Howard Gordon

[12] It is dreadful to have mercy as a witness against anyone. His final thesis is one of warning. When you've made an enemy, even of mercy, then you're hosed. Mercy is your only hope. Don't fight it. — Anonymous

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one
that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life. — Alain De Botton

I became a member of the faculty at Northwestern University in 1965 but did not complete my thesis until two years later at a graduate ceremony at which Carnegie Institute of Technology became Carnegie-Mellon University. At Northwestern, I was mentored by the 'three Bobs:' Robert Eisner, Robert Strotz and Robert Clower. — Dale T. Mortensen

I've always felt so grateful that I dropped out of school, that I never had to do a thesis. I wouldn't know how to organise and structure myself to film so that B follows A and C follows B. — Michael Moore

When I was in college, my graduation thesis was called 'Female Directors.' I interviewed all of the important female directors from Mexico. There were four. That was it. — Patricia Riggen

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. — Karl Polanyi

It is part of my thesis that all our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes. — Karl Popper

The most widely discussed formulation of [the One World model] was the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. "We may be witnessing, Fukuyama argued, " ... :;the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.":; ... The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring. (P. 31 — Samuel P. Huntington

Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time you would hand in an assignment, a paper, or even a thesis. Your book needs time to mature, and you must allow yourself the luxury of rewriting and editing until you are satisfied. — Gudjon Bergmann

Put Rachel facing the door, in a faint subtle effort to make her know that if he had only had enough money and had managed to finish the thesis, he might well have asked her to be his hostess and share her life with him. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

RON: I just gotta finish my thesis.
MUTHA WIT: What's a thesis?
RON: It's a long paper I gotta write.
MUTHA WIT: Then what you do after you don write it?
RON: Then I gotta show it to a bunch of white folks.
MUTHA WIT: Then what?
RON: Hopefully I can get paid like one of them white folks.
MUTHA WIT: Then what?
RON: Then nutin. What you mean then what? Then I'm done. I git a job. I live, become fabulously rich and mildly famous.
MUTHA WIT: Then what?
RON: Then I drop dead I guess I don't know. — Robert O'Hara

I would guess that Ray Bradbury would be equally resentful of what they did with Illustrated Man, which, you know, took a central idea thesis of his and pissed all over it - made it into one of the worst movies ever made. — Rod Serling

You, my dear ... have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven't said as much, it's been on your mind. Am I right?'
She nodded.
'Yes. And I'm not going to offer a long motivational thesis - the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you need only say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet) — Stephen King

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [ ... ] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis. — Richard Dawkins

It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. — Erich Fromm

The "thesis neurosis" has begun: the student abandons the thesis, returns to it, feels unfulfilled, loses focus, and uses his thesis as an alibi to avoid other challenges in his life that he is too cowardly to address. This student will never graduate. — Umberto Eco

(Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.) — Barbara W. Tuchman

Many people in Europe and the U.S. dispute the thesis that we are living through a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. But a radical minority of Muslims firmly believes that Islam is under siege, and is committed to winning the holy war it has declared against the West. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I wrote my master's thesis on cartoons! — Warren Spector

Her senior thesis was based on the notion that no one should be allowed to own more land than could be worked in a day, by hand. — Alice Walker

My high school career was undistinguished except for math and science. However, having barely been admitted to Rice University, I found that I enjoyed the courses and the elation of success and graduated with honors in physics. I did a senior thesis with C.F. Squire, building a regulator for a magnet for use in low-temperature physics. — Robert Woodrow Wilson

One evening we were exploring the Baths of Caracalla together, while debating the question of merit or demerit in human behaviour and its rewards in life. As I was propounding some outrageous thesis or another in answer to the strictly orthodox and pious views put forward by him, his foot slipped and the next moment he was lying in a bruised condition at the bottom of a steep ruined staircase.
'Look at that for divine justice,' I said, helping him onto his feet. 'I blaspheme, you fall.'
This irreverence, accompanied by roars of laughter, apparently went to far, and thenceforth all religious arguments were banned. — Hector Berlioz

The whole discussion now underway on revolutionary forms in Russia and in China boils down to the judgement to be made of the historical phenomenon of the "appearance" of industrialism and mechanisation in huge areas of the world previously dominated by landed and precapitalist forms of production.
Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and "national" plans are made. This is the mistaken thesis. — Amadeo Bordiga