Expendability Theory Quotes

Augustine, who assumed that Genesis 1 was chapter 1 in a book that contained the literal words of God, and that Genesis 2 was the second chapter in the same book, put the two chapters together and read the latter as a sequel. Genesis 2, he assumed, described the fall from the perfection and original goodness of creation depicted in chapter 1. So almost inevitably the Christian scriptures from the fourth century on were interpreted against the background of this (mis) understanding.

The primary trouble with this theory was that by the fourth century of the Common Era there were no Jews to speak of left in the Christian movement, and therefore the only readers and interpreters of the ancient Hebrew myths were Gentiles, who had no idea what these stories originally meant. Consequently, they interpreted them as perfection established by God in chapter 1, followed by perfection ruined by human beings in chapter 2. Why was that a problem? Well I, for one, have never known a Jewish scripture scholar to treat the Garden of Eden story in the same way that Gentiles treat it. Jews tend to see this story not as a narrative about sin entering the world, but as a parable about the birth of self-consciousness. It is, for the Jews, not a fall into sin, but a step into humanity. It is the birth of a new relationship with God, changing from master-servant to interdependent cooperation. The forbidden fruit was not from an apple tree, as so many who don't bother to read the text seem ~ John Shelby Spong

Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration. ~ David E. Goldberg

People who always arrive early aren't worth waiting for. ~ Crystal Woods

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The planet Mars
crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms
has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin. ~ David Grinspoon

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. ~ John Stuart Mill

She knew for a fact that being left-handed automatically made you special.
Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, and Albert Schweitzer were all left-handed. Of course, no believable scientific theory could rest on such a small group of people. When Lindsay probed further, however, more proof emerged. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carrol, H.G. Wells, Eudora Welty, and Jessamyn West- all lefties. The lack of women in her research had initially bothered her until she mentioned it to Allegra. "Chalk that up to male chauvinism," she said. "Lots of left-handed women were geniuses. Janis Joplin was. All it means is that the macho-man researchers didn't bother asking. ~ Jo-Ann Mapson

Politics means implementation of the best ideas for the society in the path of wellbeing and progress. This is the approach that gave the world, leaders of glorious characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Subhas Chandra Bose (the actual man behind India's Independence), Vasil Levski (the man who liberated Bulgaria from the Ottoman oppression), Nelson Mandela and many more. These people were technically politicians too, but unlike the majority of the politicians of
modern society, their approach to politics was what it should be in a real system of politics. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Grand - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - and ~ James Gleick

My latest theory is that it's - well, I describe it as, like, being in an apartment with kind of thin walls. And in the apartment next door, they've got a radio tuned constantly on - tuned to a really cool radio station. It's on all the time. And you can just hear it coming through the wall all the time. ~ Nick Lowe

A new question for the psychotherapist to ask is whether a theory can go beyond mere effectiveness in achieving either a so-called cure or even personal growth into its implications for the nature of an evolving society. ~ Erving Polster

Political realism believes that politics, like society in general, is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature. In order to improve society it is first necessary to understand the laws by which society lives. The operation of these laws being impervious to our preferences, men will challenge them only at the risk of failure.
Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion - between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment, divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

Mr. Greenspan did a very good job in the early 1990's. But recently he's fallen prey to this crazy theory that prosperity causes inflation. So they're trying to slow the economy down by raising interest rates. It's like a doctor saying you're in great health, so we have to make you sick a little bit. It's a bizarre theory. It's going to hurt our economy. ~ Steve Forbes

The importance of C.F. Gauss for the development of modern physical theory and especially for the mathematical fundament of the theory of relativity is overwhelming indeed; also his achievement of the system of absolute measurement in the field of electromagnetism. In my opinion it is impossible to achieve a coherent objective picture of the world on the basis of concepts which are taken more or less from inner psychological experience. ~ Albert Einstein

The only trouble with this scheme is that it does not work, for other reasons. Every theory that you make up has to be analysed against all possible consequences, to see if it predicts anything else. And this does predict something else. If the earth is moving, more particles will hit it from in front than from behind. ~ Anonymous

Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning. ~ Marina Warner

In the first stage of insight-building, all that researchers can do is observe phenomena. Second, they classify the phenomena in a way that helps them simplify the apparent complexities of the world so they can ignore the meaningless differences and draw connections between the things that really seem to matter. Third, based on the classification system, they propose a theory. The theory is a statement of what causes what and why, and under what circumstances. ~ Clayton Christensen

Now I'm no biologist, but it seems to make a lot of sense that slow lives, as well as being enjoyable, are long lives. One only has to think of the example of the tortoise for proof of this theory from the animal world. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

Now I have a theory that if a woman wants to keep a man she only needs to say two things: She believes in him and he's got a big a cock. That's all it takes. It doesn't even have to be true. ~ Ethan Hawke

(A)ny working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point - the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

I've learned that when you get to be a certain age, you can get away with saying a lot of things, some of which wouldn't even be remotely funny if someone forty years younger said them. The Golden Girls ran for years off the same theory and basically used the same four jokes for seven marvelous seasons. ~ George Takei

The theory of rights enables us to rise and overthrow obstacles, but not to found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation. ~ Giuseppe Mazzini

Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists. ~ Richard Dawkins

Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure. ~ Gordon Brown

In learning general relativity, and then in teaching it to classes at Berkeley and MIT, I became dissatisfied with what seemed to be the usual approach to the subject. I found that in most textbooks geometric ideas were given a starring role, so that a student...would come away with an impression that this had something to do with the fact that space-time is a Riemannian [curved] manifold. Of course, this was Einstein's point of view, and his preeminent genius necessarily shapes our understanding of the theory he created. However, I believe that the geometrical approach has driven a wedge between general relativity and [Quantum Field Theory]. As long as it could be hoped, as Einstein did hope, that matter would eventually be understood in geometrical terms, it made sense to give Riemannian geometry a primary role in describing the theory of gravitation. But now the passage of time has taught us not to expect that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms, and too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscuret he deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics...[My] book sets out the theory of gravitation according to what I think is its inner logic as a branch of physics, and not according to its historical development. It is certainly a historical fact that when Albert Einstein was working out general relativity, there was at hand a preexisting mathematical formalism, that of Riemannian geometry, that he could an ~ Steven Weinberg

…let us point out precisely the difficulties of empiricism as a theory of knowledge. First, it begins with two fixed, unchangeable ultimates--mind and matter. Second, it asserts that knowledge is the agreement of ideas with each other, in which case we are not dealing with nature or things at all, and consequently, have left out one of our ultimates. Third, it then asserts (for it is essential that knowledge should somehow or other be connected with things) that knowledge consists in the agreement between an idea and a thing; and in this case we can never tell when the agreement takes place; and furthermore, it is impossible for ideas and things to disagree, for, according to the theory, ideas are copies of things. This means that empiricism can not account for the fact of error. Every theory of knowledge must make a place for error, for, as is evident, error seems to be as industrious as truth.
Consequently, if knowledge actually does take place, if there is such an activity, thing, or relation as knowledge, empiricism fails to give an account of it which is free from contradictions. The moral is, as the stories in our school readers say, don't begin with fixed things, for they beguileth one into inconsistencies. ~ Holly Estil Cunningham

One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and dark and to movement. The rabbi speculated that if emotions are similar to eyesight and other senses, then perhaps emotions were developed by nature as a survival mechanism. ~ Alan Lightman

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives - carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers' learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems. ~ George Gilder

I think game theory creates ideas that are important in solving and approaching conflict in general. ~ Robert Aumann

Twenty years ago many chemists would have defended the theory of bond arms as a satisfactory explanation because they had become accustomed to thinking of it as unique and as ultimate. ~ Henry Margenau

There is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House. ~ Bill Hicks

Our faith in democracy, personal freedoms and human 'rights', and the other comforting prescriptions of the humanist liberal credo stem from the supremacy of maritime over territorial power. Pragmatists may deplore this as crude determinism, as another vain attempt to construct a general theory of history. They should reflect on the sort of political philosophy and structures we might now adhere to had the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Bonaparte, Hitler, Stalin or his heirs prevailed in the titanic world struggles of the past four centuries. ~ Peter Padfield

It is obvious that mathematics needs both sorts of mathematicians, theory-builders and problem-solvers. ~ Timothy Gowers

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. ~ Jennifer Egan

How glorious, then, is the prospect, the reverse of all the past, which is now opening upon us, and upon the world. Government, we may now expect to see, not only in theory and in books but in actual practice, calculated for the general good, and taking no more upon it than the general good requires, leaving all men the enjoyment of as many of their natural rights as possible, and no more interfering with matters of religion, with men's notions concerning God, and a future state, than with philosophy, or medicine. ~ Joseph Priestley

Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on. ~ Brian Cox

If Feynman could see beauty as the inspiration for the theory of the rainbow, and if an electron could behave like a wave, and light like a particle, then the little contradiction of Leonard flitting among different subfields of physics, or even among varied careers, would not shake the universe. ~ Anonymous

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down. ~ John Ciardi

Thus it can be argued that quantum theory provides an opening for an idea of nature and of our role within it that is in general accord with certain religious concepts, but that, by contrast, is quite incompatible with the precepts of mechanistic deterministic classical physics. Thus the replacement of classical mechanics by quantum mechanics opens the door to religious possibilities that formerly were rationally excluded. ~ Paul Davies

Sex is too important a matter to be left to the independent judgment of young women, because young women rarely possess good judgment. The overwhelming majority of women will be happier in the long run by marrying an ordinary man and having children than byseeking sexual thrills, ascending the corporate heights or grinding out turgid tracts on gender theory. A woman develops an emotional bond with her mate through the sexual act itself; this is why arranged marriages (contrary to Western prejudice) are often reasonably happy.Romantic courtship hasits harms, but is finally dispensable; marriage isnot dispensable. ~ F. Roger Devlin

We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions. ~ Albert Einstein

A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior. ~ Albert Bandura

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die."
His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.
After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this
"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working. ~ Douglas Adams

Yes," I said, "that is what I mean to say. I am not going to vote for him." The others began to find their voices. They sang the same note. They said that when a party's representatives choose a man, that ends it. If they choose unwisely it is a misfortune, but no loyal member of the party has any right to withhold his vote. He has a plain duty before him and he can't shirk it. He must vote for that nominee. I said that no party held the privilege of dictating to me how I should vote. That if party loyalty was a form of patriotism, I was no patriot, and that I didn't think I was much of a patriot anyway, for oftener than otherwise what the general body of Americans regarded as the patriotic course was not in accordance with my views; that if there was any valuable difference between being an American and a monarchist it lay in the theory that the American could decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't; whereas ~ Mark Twain

People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing. ~ W. Edwards Deming

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds ... ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A man who has bought a theory will fight a vigorous rearguard action against the facts. ~ Joseph Alsop

Why is The Origin of Species such a great book? First of all, because it convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: it provides a vast and well-chosen body of evidence showing that existing animals and plants cannot have been separately created in their present forms, but must have evolved from earlier forms by slow transformation. And secondly, because the theory of natural selection, which the Origin so fully and so lucidly expounds, provides a mechanism by which such transformation could and would automatically be produced. ~ Charles Darwin