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Theorists Quotes

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Theorists Quotes

“The "left" ABC (Anything But Class) theorists say we are giving too much attention to class. Who exactly is doing that? Surveying the mainstream academic publications, radical journals, and socialist scholars conferences, one is hard put to find much class analysis of any kind. Far from giving too much attention to class power, most U.S. writers and commentators have yet to discover the subject. While pummeling a rather minuscule Marxist Left, the ABC theorists would have us think they are doing courageous battle against hordes of Marxists who dominate intellectual discourse in this country-yet another hallucination they hold in common with conservatives”

ClassOppressionTheoristsAcademics
Book:Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
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“The lumbermen...regarded forest devastation as normal and second growth as a delusion of fools....And as for sustained yield, no such idea had ever entered their heads. The few friends the forest had were spoken of, when they were spoken of at all, as impractical theorists, fanatics, or "denudatics," more or less touched in the head. What talk there was about forest protection was no more to the average American that the buzzing of a mosquito, and just about as irritating.”

IdeasGrowthTreeFoolNormalAverageProtectionForestsTouchedDelusionYieldFanaticsIrritatingMosquitoesDevastationTheoristsFew Friends
Author:Gifford Pinchot
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“Is the world ruled by strict laws or not? This question I regard as metaphysical. The laws we find are always hypotheses; which means that they may always be superseded, and that they may possibly be deduced from probability estimates. Yet denying causality would be the same as attempting to persuade the theorist to give up his search; and that such an attempt cannot be backed by anything like a proof.”

WorldGivingMayMeanWould BeLawScienceGiving UpRegardProofStrictProbabilityMetaphysicalMechanicHypothesisAttemptingQuantum MechanicsTheoristsCausalityStrict Laws
Book:The Logic of Scientific Discovery
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“Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.”

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Author:Charles Baudelaire
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“The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.”

WorldLinesWork OutDiscoveringRemedyUnfortunateParallelsGeometryAxiomsStraight LinesCollisionTheoristsRebuke
Book:General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money
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“Just in time for the renewal of the war debate in Congress, the University of Chicago Press has released The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. . . . It's a nifty volume, not only because it gives you a sense of what our most highly regarded military theorists are thinking but because sometimes what they're thinking is the last thing you'd expect. Especially interesting is a section called 'Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations,' which tells us: 'Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction' and 'Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.'”

ThinkingGivingWarSometimesLastsUsedForceInterestingMilitaryFieldsArmyPressesUniversityCongressDebateReactionsOperationsParadoxChicagoVolumeSectionsMarineRenewalDoing NothingManualsMarine CorpsTheoristsCounterinsurgency
Author:David L. Ulin
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“Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)”

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Author:Eric S. Raymond
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“I tend to be a loner – I think a lot of social theorists are like that. On one level, the majority of the most important people to me are people who I have imaginary conversations with in the deep of the night: I'm often in conversation with Max Weber or Karl Marx or someone like that. Those are the people I'm closest to and that have had the most influence on me!”

PeopleThinkingImportantNightSocialLevelsInfluenceConversationMajorityImaginaryClosestMaxLonerTheoristsWeber
Author:George Ritzer
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“Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters.”

IfsGivingWritingYearsHumansHeartSelfReasonSufferingHumanityPassionForceExpressionCivilizationDiscoveryLettersAssumingCardsDevicesSentimentsLeisureDeclineHuman HeartTelephonesSelf ExpressionIngeniousLamentTheoristsDerisionLetter WritingTelegrams
Author:Agnes Repplier
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“In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.”

IfsLittlesHas BeensMightCertainGivenStuffDiseaseSavedRadicalOpponentsContradictionVocabularyMight Have BeenDrowningTheoristsSwineDeadly Diseases
Book:Anthills of the Savannah
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“From the Berlin tenement reform law of 1897 to H. P. Berlage's plan for Amsterdam South of 1917, designers and theorists in Germany and Holland moved toward the development of a perimeter residential block that would preserve the plastic continuity of the street while opening up the resultant courtyard for use as an enclosed semi-public space.”

UseLawSpacePlansStreetsDevelopmentMovedSouthOpeningBlockReformPreservesDesignerGermanyPlasticContinuityBerlinOpening UpTheoristsHollandAmsterdamTenementsPerimeter
Author:Kenneth Frampton
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“Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes. ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them.”

PeopleTwoIdeasPoetryLiteratureShareMetaphorSurfaceContraryAttributesOur ThoughtsDomainAssertionCognitiveTheoristsMapping
Author:Don Paterson
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“In view of the importance of philanthropy in our society, it is surprising that so little attention has been given to it by economic or social theorists. In economic theory, especially, the subject is almost completely ignored. This is not, I think, because economists regard mankind as basically selfish or even because economic man is supposed to act only in his self-interest; it is rather because economics has essentially grown up around the phenomenon of exchange and its theoretical structure rests heavily on this process.”

ThinkingMenLittlesHas BeensSelfGivenSocialProcessInterestViewsAttentionEconomicSubjectsMankindTheoryEconomicsImportanceRegardStructureSelfishOur SocietyPhenomenonSurprisingPhilanthropyIgnoredEconomistTheoreticalSelf InterestTheoristsEconomic Theory
Author:Kenneth E. Boulding
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“I am often talking about the ideas collected in Normal Life in contexts that are not academic, or that are full of people who are not primarily engaging as theorists or theory-readers. Being able to make ideas visual, especially critical ideas about movements that can be difficult to hear because of attachments we have to certain national narratives, or because of ways that we see ourselves, is especially useful.”

PeopleWayIdeasAbleCertainDifficultTalkingMovementTheoryReaderNormalCriticalNarrativeVisualsAttachmentAcademicEngagingNormal LifeTheorists
Author:Dean Spade
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“If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.”

IfsWantNeedsWritingMadeTwoStoriesChoicesReadingNextWalksFictionSawsFeetThousandPicksContemporaryCraftsDullShort StoryImperfectConcreteNext TimeFloatingAbstractionFiction WritersTheoristsSyntaxScalpels
Author:John McNally
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“...I think the popular view of Science is a solid body of truth, shared by a whole lot of learned men in a room, all agreeing on the answers to the questions of how the Universe works. Whereas nothing could be further from the truth!!! The one truth that I see emerging from the History of Science is that experiment has always surprised theorists. Einstein included!”

ThinkingMenWholeBodyUniverseAnswersRoomsViewsExperimentsEmergingTheoristsHistory Of Science
Author:Brian May
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“So-called "natural language" is wonderful for the purposes it was created for, such as to be rude in, to tell jokes in, to cheat or to make love in (and Theorists of Literary Criticism can even be content-free in it), but it is hopelessly inadequate when we have to deal unambiguously with situations of great intricacy, situations which unavoidably arise in such activities as legislation, arbitration, mathematics or programming.”

PurposeLanguageNaturalDealsSituationWonderfulActivityJokesCriticismMathematicsAriseProgrammingCheatMaking LoveRudeLegislationInadequateTheoristsLiterary CriticismIntricacyArbitration
Author:Edsger Dijkstra
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“Governments and citizens blend together only in the imaginations of political theorists. Government is, and always will be, an alien power over private citizens. There is no magic in a ballot box that makes government any less coercive.”

GovernmentTogetherPoliticalImaginationMagicCitizensBoxesAliensBallotsTheorists
Book:Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen
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