Theory Quotes

“People who always arrive early aren't worth waiting for.”
― Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 2

“The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“An enthusiastic philosopher, of whose name we are not informed, had constructed a very satisfactory theory on some subject or other, and was not a little proud of it. "But the facts, my dear fellow," said his friend, "the facts do not agree with your theory."—"Don't they?" replied the philosopher, shrugging his shoulders, "then, tant pis pour les faits;"—so much the worse for the facts!”
― Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

“Observations always involve theory.”
― Edwin Powell Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae

“I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“One of the bigger mistakes of our time, I suppose, was preaching the demonization of all judgment without teaching how to judge righteously. We now live in an age where, apart from the inability to bear even good judgment when it so passes by, still everyone, inevitably, has a viral opinion (judgment) about everything and everyone, but little skill in good judgment as its verification or harness.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“A real translation is transparent.”
― Walter Benjamin

“resistance often lacks an overt political project and frequently reflects social practices that are informal, disorganised, apolitical, and atheoretical in nature. In some instances it can reduce itself to an unreflective and defeatist refusal to acquiesce to different forms of domination; on some occasions it can be seen as a cynical, arrogant, or even naive rejection of oppressive forms of moral and political regulation”
― Henry A. Giroux

“Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs
of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the
surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness
reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to
embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would
then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What
we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic
theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it
turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life.
And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by
its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and
imagination—the one annexed to fact, the other to theory—has been the source
of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely
the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation
of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return
to anthropology.”
― Tim Ingold

“...definitely believe that, there's got to be a spark to a place...to make it feel like a home...”
― Isabella koldras, poem My Home.

“Une œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix.”
― Marcel Proust

“Police officers are well known for their aggressive behaviors, search "Police Officer Angry Aggression Theory". I can speak from personal experience that they do cover up for each other and target individuals that they have a vendetta on. Police Internal Affairs is just an extension of the cover up machine, they uphold very few complaints.”
― Steven Magee

“Like all great things which then become fashions, science, as now the universal stamp of approval, probably receives more abuse than any other field of study. Glaze the word itself over whatever vague ideology one may presume ratified, no matter the degree of pseudo-science or lack of scholarly credibility packaged within, and the many will consume it like gravy on a feast. My thought for the time is that as the promise of true science increases, so shall rise its many more superficial counterparts as provided by the agenda-bound trendies and hyper-ambitious laypersons to boot.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.”
― Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale

“Marx made theory... Lenin applied it with his sense of large-scale social organization... And Henry Ford made the work of the socialist state possible.”
― Diego Rivera

“...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“The wrong approaches to faith and to skepticism are equally detrimental to the path. For the former declares its answers too soon and is later found false; the latter rejects sound answers altogether and hashes itself useless.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“At school we learn the theory to do the practice, but they didn't teach you that in real life you learn from the practice to know the theory”
― Goitsemang Mvula

“Leaders walk their talks. They don’t give theories that do not work. They have clarity into their dreams and insight into their directions!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder

“People are tired of being told that it's possible... It's time to show them how it can be possible. Leadership is demonstration.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder

“Theory is the best guide for experiment—that were it not for theory and the problems and hypotheses that come out of it, we would not know the points we wanted to verify, and hence would experiment aimlessly”
― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science

“ليس الخلل في النظرة من الزاوية الدينية، فالدين كما نؤمن ليس الصلاة والصيام والحج والزكاة فحسب، بل هو الحياة بعمومها وخصوصها، وإنما الخلل في ما تركته دعوات المتغربين فكرياً والمتعلمنين بغير دراية ولا ثقافة ولا سلطان مبين، من أثر في أسلوب التفكير والنظرة للنص الديني، فخلقت حساسية مفرطة تجاه النصوص الدينية لا مبرر أصلاً لوجودها.”
― د. نادر الملاح, النظام الإداري الإسلامي

“التعريف العام للإدارة، حسب ما نرى اعتماداً على مجموعة من التعاريف المعتمدة والشائعة الاستخدام في الأوساط العلمية، هو أنها "عملية تجميع عوامل الإنتاج المختلفة من رأس مال وقوى عاملة وموارد طبيعية أو مُصنَّعة، وتنظيمها في أجزاء متفاعلة من أجل استثمارها بأفضل الطرق الممكنة لتحقيق الأهداف المرجوة".”
― د. نادر الملاح, النظام الإداري الإسلامي

“لسنا نؤيد القول الذاهب إلى أن الإدارة بشكلها المنظم تعود إلى فجر التاريخ، وإن كنا لا ننكر أن الممارسات الإدارية التي كانت قائمة آنذاك تمثل جزءً مهما من هذه التراكمات التي أدت إلى قيام الأنظمة الإدارية وما نشهده اليوم من تطور في مفهوم وأساليب الإدارة، حيث ينبغي التفريق بين وجود النظام الإداري وقيام التنظيمات الإدارية، إذ لا يعني وجود التنظيم الإداري بالضرورة وجود نظام إداري مصاحبٍ له.”
― د. نادر الملاح, النظام الإداري الإسلامي

“نلاحظ في العديد من أدبيات الإدارة الحديثة خلط بعض الكُتّاب والمؤلفين بين أنواع الإدارة وتفريعاتها، حيث يُعطى عنوان "أنواع الإدارة" للتفريعات والأقسام مما تسبب في حالة من الإبهام في هذا الإطار لاتزال قائمة حتى اليوم بالأخص عند غير المختصين.”
― د. نادر الملاح, النظام الإداري الإسلامي

“التخطيط هو عملية ذهنية بطبيعتها تعتمد على التفكير الإبداعي والقدرة على استشراف المستقبل والتنبؤ بالأحداث والمتغيرات وخلق العلاقات والروابط بين المعطيات والمعلومات المتوفرة، من أجل بلورة الصورة حول موقف معين أو مواقف معينة، وسبل التعامل معها. ويعتبر عامل الزمن أحد العوامل المهمة في هذه المرحلة.”
― د. نادر الملاح, النظام الإداري الإسلامي

“The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truth of ethics and methematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.”
― Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

“Leadership is built on inspirations. Inspiration does both the theoretical and the practical job. By inspiration, people are not only informed to know what is right. But they are also convinced to always do what’s right.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Ladder

“Make Theory Talk is an art which is rare in the world.”
― Umair Hassan

“Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne. And Picasso once said that what matters most to us in Cézanne, more than his pictures, is his anxiety. It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator, so that his encounter with the work is--at least while the work is new-- a genuine existential predicament. Like Kierkegaard's God, the work molests us with its aggressive absurdity [...]. It demands a decision in which you discover something of your own quality; and this decision is always a "leap of faith," to use Kierkegaard's famous term. And like Kierkegaard's God, who demands a sacrifice from Abraham in violation of every moral standard: like Kierkegaard's God, the picture seems arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while it makes no promise of future rewards. In other words, it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public, artists included, should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.”
― Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art