Historical Theory Quotes

Many historians emphasize the catastrophic breaks, ruptures, turning points, as the true stuff of history, but the field would be incomplete without a look into the continuities. ~ Ilan Stavans

Because of their historical theory of the "alienation of labor" (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself. ~ Paul Goodman

No matter where she went, God was her family. He was her hope. ~ Tricia Goyer

Facts are of not much use, considered as facts. They bewilder by their number and their apparent incoherency. Let them be digested into theory, however, and brought into mutual harmony, and it is another matter. ~ Oliver Heaviside

It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. ~ Albert J. Nock

Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation. ~ Daniel Goleman

A real magician makes no claim to violate physical laws; he only appears to do so. However, when pseudoscientists make claims to discover dramatic new phenomena, going beyond current physical theory, like telepathy or mental metal bending, then, like children, we must insist on seeing how the trick is done or as adults sit back and enjoy the entertainment. As ~ Heinz R. Pagels

What bizarre planet have I landed on? So Haley settles for a single kiss, and I lose it to the first guy to ask me out, after falling for some crazy theory involving my lucky bracelet? ~ Talia Vance

To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations. ~ Octavio Paz

The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity. ~ Karl R. Popper

We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. But maybe some theories are complicated, and we can only find the simple ones. ~ Hod Lipson

An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
conventional wisdom. ~ Steven D. Levitt

To write timelessly about the here and now, a writer must approach the present indirectly. The story has to be about more than it at first seems. Shakespeare used the historical sources of his plays as a scaffolding on which to construct detailed portraits of his own age. The interstices between the secondhand historical plots and Shakespeare's startlingly original insights into Elizabethan England are what allow his work to speak to us today. Reading Shakespeare, we know what it is like, in any age, to be alive. So it is with Moby-Dick, a novel about a whaling voyage to the Pacific that is also about America racing hell-bent toward the Civil War and so much more. Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 as well as a civil war in 1861 and continue to drive this country's ever-contentious march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or as a profit-crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010 or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

Yet in one way or another all of us - readers and writers alike - are ultimately prisoners of the documents. And the chains are hard to see ~ Charles Tilly

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective. ~ Errol Morris

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work. ~ Richard Dawkins

A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. ~ Lysander Spooner

I believe conspiracy theories are part of a larger conspiracy to distract us from the real conspiracy. String theory. ~ Andy Kindler

Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants. ~ Seneca The Younger

The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes. ~ Robert Musil

Be thankful all she did was raise her voice," Mr. Blackpool told Sarah conspiratorially. "During the ride to London, I had to talk her out of scaling up the townhouse walls, should the door go unanswered."
She had to hide her smile at the image of flamboyant Mrs. Blackpool climbing row houses like a circus monkey. "We are fortunate indeed that such measures did not prove necessary. ~ Erica Ridley

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type. ~ Charles Bukowski

There are a lot of historical lofts in Houston, and it's amazing for me that a lot of them were built in the 1920s. I love the exposed bricks and the very industrial stuff. ~ Solange Knowles

So here's my theory, and this is such crap science, I don't have to tell you. It's science without microscopes, blood tests, or reality. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I want to... have fun with writing again. Enjoy my work, enjoy playing with the language and characters like a sculptor plays with clay. But there's this manic focus on numbers--how many books have you written and how many have you sold and it's all push, push, push, and no time for reflection--but at heart, books are about dreaming... which is just the opposite. So I don't know...
M.M. Bennetts comment to Nancy Bilyeau as related in Nancy's tribute "M.M. Bennetts: The Closest Friend I Never Met ~ M.M. Bennetts

Just as, in the eyes of the liberal, the state is not the highest ideal, so it is also not the best apparatus of compulsion. The metaphysical theory of the state declares -
approaching, in this respect, the vanity and presumption of the absolute monarchs -
that each individual state is sovereign, i.e., that it represents the last and highest court of appeals. But, for the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the state. In his eyes, whatever significance national boundaries have is only incidental and subordinate. His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind. The starting-point of his entire political philosophy is the conviction that the division of labor is international and not merely national. He realizes from the very first that it is not sufficient to establish peace within each country, that it is much more important that all nations live at peace with one another. The liberal therefore demands that the political organization of society be extended until it reaches its culmination in a world state that unites all nations on an equal basis. For this reason he sees the law of each nation as subordinate to international law, and that is why he demands supranational tribunals and administrative authorities to assure peace among nations in the same way that the judicial and executive organs of each country are charged with the maintenance of peace within its own territory.
For a long time the demand for the establishment of such a sup ~ Ludwig Von Mises

There, I saw Adam messing around with a container of tic tacs. I had found the source of the cinnamon taste of his kisses. He looked up.

"Want one?" he offered.

"Sure, thanks," I replied. He proceeded to knock exactly one tic tac into his palm and hand it to me. "Are you sure you can spare this?" I asked solemnly.

"How many did you want?"

"Well, more than one. Who gives somebody one tic tac? Would it kill to be a little more generous? some psychologist somewhere probably has some theory about one tic tac givers and fear of commitment."

"Fear of commitment, my ass. You should be committed, you loon. If you were intended to have more than one tic tac, they would have just made tic tacs bigger. This is regulation sized tic tac, and it should be more than enough to satisfy your breath freshening needs," he said, sounding affronted.

"A tic tac is not merely a breath freshener, it is a candy," I pointed out, voice rising in anger. Who was he calling a loon? "And they make them small on purpose, so you'll think you're getting more, and so you'll run out faster when someone asks for one, and you will give them a few!"

"Why would someone ask for A tic tac when they really wanted several tic tacs? What does that say about their psychology?! Why not be honest from the get-go about what you want?!" he shouted back at me.

" I didn't ask for one! You offered me one, God damn it!"

"And as fo ~ N.M. Silber

Christianity is a very historical religion - it makes specific claims that are open to testing. ~ Lee Strobel

Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead. ~ Robert Wyatt

The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God's face as a religion. ~ Martin Buber

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy. ~ James A. Garfield

I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks. ~ Khaled Hosseini

To secure his king's trust, his family's future, and perhaps even his own happiness, he needed to convince her he was more than a mercenary -- in fact, a man who would stand by her side. ~ Sandra Jones

You're familiar with the theory of evolution?" asked Cabal.
"Sir?"
"They're about to find out why intelligence is a survival trait. ~ Jonathan L. Howard

Now, as it happens, theology is actually a pitilessly demanding discipline concerning an immense, profoundly sophisticated legacy of hermeneutics, dialectics, and logic; it deals in minute detail with a vast variety of concrete historical data; over the centuries, it has incubated speculative systems of extraordinary rigor and intricacy, many of whose questions and methods continue to inform contemporary philosophy; and it does, when all is said and done, constitute the single intellectual, moral, spiritual, and cultural tradition uniting the classical, medieval, and early modern worlds. ~ David Bentley Hart

Time. She had to go home. As soon as the lunar eclipse occurred in three weeks. Because if she stayed here, she would die. Either from the bullet in her back, or from the pain that was slowly sinking talons into her. ~ Shelly Thacker

Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution. Like that huge historic turning point, the revolution in marriage has transformed how people organize their work and interpersonal commitments, use their leisure time, understand their sexuality, and take care of children and the elderly. It has liberated some people from restrictive, inherited roles in society. But it has stripped others of traditional support systems and rules of behavior without establishing new ones. ~ Stephanie Coontz

We live in a moment in which old conflicts, much altered during their subterraneous years, have boiled up again. The struggle to own the past so that it can be made to serve contemporary interests has led to gross distortions. But it is true also that the experience of any generation is inevitably a warped lens through which to view the thought and the actions of any previous generation, especially when there is a lack of rigorous historical perspective to correct for these distortions. This second consideration may go some way toward explaining the fact that there are not two sides to what would otherwise be a great national controversy. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Getting the poison to them is more difficult than it should be. I cannot just slip it into their food, they eat with the rest of the household, and as much as I dislike everyone here, I am not willing to poison them all. At least not yet. ~ Robin LaFevers

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. ~ Terence Tao

The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you'll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string. ~ Brian Greene

I once did an event with Ian Rankin where he said he didn't really need to do much background research because his books are set in the present, and I just thought: 'You lucky, lucky beast!' because as a historical novelist, I live constantly on the edge of wondering whether tissues had been invented. ~ Sara Sheridan

One cannot read Genesis literally - meaning as a literally accurate description of physical, historical reality - in view of the state of scientific knowledge today and our knowledge of ancient Near Eastern stories of origins. Those who read Genesis literally must either ignore evidence completely or present alternate "theories" in order to maintain spiritual stability. Unfortunately, advocates of alternate scientific theories sometimes keep themselves free of the burden of tainted peer review. Such professional isolation can encourage casually sweeping aside generations and even centuries of accumulated knowledge. ~ Peter Enns

Great mathematics is achieved by solving difficult problems not by fabricating elaborate theories in search of a problem. ~ Harold Davenport