Sunday, July 4, 2010 – Toward a Unified Theory of Theories
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage. ~ Mark Russell
Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you’re a consultant. ~ Scott Adams
If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going. ~ Professor Irwin Corey
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. ~ Tom Robbins
A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. ~ Stefan Banach
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions. ~ Emile M. Cioran
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left. ~ Alexander Pope
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on. ~ Jack Kerouac
During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions. ~ Lynn Abbey
Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities. ~ Thomas Sowell
In making theories, always keep a window open so that you can throw one out if necessary. ~ Béla Lugosi
No religious position is loyally served by refusing to consider annoying theories which may well turn out to be facts. ~ Norman Lamm
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense. ~ David Deutsch
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests. ~ David Deutsch
The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms. ~ John B. S. Haldane
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted. ~ Steven Wright
Theories pass. The frog remains. ~ Jean Rostand
There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works. ~ Charley Lau
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. ~ Yogi Berra
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. ~ H. L. Mencken
Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. ~ Benito Mussolini
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all. ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. ~ Benjamin Disraeli
In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life. ~ Marcel Proust
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. ~ Douglas Adams
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts. ~ George Santayana
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact. Only a spiritually bankrupt society could ever believe it. Only atheists could accept this Satanic theory. ~ Jimmy Swaggart
The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation. ~ Adam Smith
He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world. ~ J. D. Salinger
My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare. ~ Mike Myers
When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve. ~ Karl Popper
While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact. ~ Andrea Dworkin
A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person. ~ Edward W. Howe
There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true. ~ Ian Hart
Don’t confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science. ~ Martin H. Fischer
Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception – that one perceives the world by perceiving one’s sense-data… or something like that. ~ David Chalmers
Funeral by funeral, theory advances. ~ Paul Samuelson
Just Above Sunset 