Theory Quotes

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.

A scientific theory is a tool and not a creed.

Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.

The legal theory is, that marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband.

I'm a firm believer that in the theory that people only do their best at things they truly enjoy. It is difficult to excel at something you don't enjoy.

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000).... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Can you measure it? Can you express it in figures? Can you make a model of it? If not, your theory is apt to be based more upon imagination than upon knowledge.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

I always had the theory that the most important thing is be happy, enjoy what are you doing, and be fresh mentally.

A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

I am a misanthropic humanist... Do I like people? They're great, IN THEORY.

We see the world in terms of our theories.

There is a gulf between the high value Americans put on life in theory and its cheapness in practice.

There are many Christians who are Christians in theory only, and they are worldlings in practice.

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.

At a purely formal level, one could call probability theory the study of measure spaces with total measure one, but that would be like calling number theory the study of strings of digits which terminate.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

I am even grateful to Einstein and others because through their erroneous theories they lead mankind away from that dangerous path I followed.

Nothing is more practical than a good theory.

Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement