Labeling Theory Quotes

I finally saw the whole conspiracy standing as plain as an elephant in the street; also the conspiracy was admitted to me in great detail by one of the princes of the conspiracy."
"Bad, Smith, very bad."
"If one of the inmates should come to you right now, Doctor, and tell you it was raining outside, you'd say 'Bad, very bad', and make damning marks on his record."
" That's probably true. It's an automatic response with me. ~ R.A. Lafferty

That is, whether or not an act is considered deviant depends upon how it is labeled (defined) by other people. For example, in a well-known study of jazz musicians, Becker (1963) found marijuana use to be considered normal by the musicians, but labeled as illegal, deviant behavior by the larger society, and subject to sanctions like arrest, fines, and jail terms. Although labeling theory pertained to deviance generally, several studies focused on the mental patient experience in which persons once treated for mental illness found it difficult to shed the label of "former mental patient" even if the experience was in the past and the person supposedly cured (Scheff [1966] 1999). ~ William C. Cockerham

I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination. ~ Alan Moore

The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy. ~ Peter Senge

My theory is children don't do what you tell them to do, they do what you do. You have to always do the right thing because they follow you. ~ Boman Irani

I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.
[Referring to the trouble he had with the peer reviewers of Anglo-American astrophysical journals because his ideas often conflicted with the generally accepted or "standard"" theories.] ~ Hannes Alfven

Have I really been in a battle?" wondered Stendhal's hero after many hours blundering around the field of Waterloo, and many people today share a similar perplexity. Like Stendhal's hero, they eat and drink and sustain the business of life, but the meaning of it all depends upon their conviction of contributing to the liberation of workers, women, the colonized, or other varieties of the oppressed. Like Fabrizio del Dongo, they find a regiment and tag along - the Hussars against Patriarchy, the Dragoon Guards of the Proletariat, and so on. Quite where the real battle lies is hotly disputed, but its significance is agreed to be a final end to oppression. (…) My argument, then, is an exploration of the hypothesis that there is a pure theory of ideology, and while from one point of view it is a critique, from another it is a do-it-yourself ideology kit. It begins with some suggestions about how ideology was generated from eighteenth-century social theory. The long central section is an attempt to characterize ideologies as forms of understanding. The last section develops the view that, although ideology must take on political trappings in order to transform the world, its real character is entirely antithetical to the practice of politics. Ideology is to reality, I suggest, as (in Tolstoy's opinion) the reports of battles are to the concrete experience of individuals in the field. In ideological moods, we think we see in social and political life those clear lines from the hist ~ Kenneth Minogue

A theory must be tempered with reality. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Before becoming a mother I had a hundred theories on how to bring up children. Now I have seven children and only one theory: love them, especially when they least deserve to be loved. ~ Kate Samperi

Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot

What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination. ~ Terence McKenna

Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge. ~ David Halberstam

What the string theorists do is arguably physics. It deals with the physical world. They're attempting to make a consistent theory that explains the interactions we see among particles and gravity as well. That's certainly physics, but it's a kind of physics that is not yet testable. ~ Sheldon Lee Glashow

It was a crazy theory. But when Angels are involved, crazy is almost normal. ~ James Patterson

I had no desire to tell anyone I was in love. I knew and that was all that mattered. I had a theory that sharing would somehow take away the love and give it to everyone else. And I wanted it. All to myself. ~ Dominic Riccitello

It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights. There may be something in this theory, but when their amusements are carried to such a point of luxurious and imaginative perfection it certainly gives them great and even unlimited enjoyment at the time. ~ Ada Leverson

I have a name for people who went to the extreme efficient market theory-which is "bonkers". It was an intellectually consistent theory that enabled them to do pretty mathematics. So I understand its seductiveness to people with large mathematical gifts. It just had a difficulty in that the fundamental assumption did not tie properly to reality. ~ Charlie Munger

No, Rodion Romanovitch, Nikolay doesn't come in! This is a fantastic, gloomy business, a modern case, an incident of to-day when the heart of man is troubled, when the phrase is quoted that blood 'renews,' when comfort is preached as the aim of life. Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories. Here we see resolution in the first stage, but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the crime. He forgot to shut the door after him, and murdered two people for a theory. He committed the murder and couldn't take the money, and what he did manage to snatch up he hid under a stone. It wasn't enough for him to suffer agony behind the door while they battered at the door and rung the bell, no, he had to go to the empty lodging, half delirious, to recall the bell-ringing, ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

His [Thomas Edison] method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. In view of this, the truly prodigious amount of his actual accomplishments is little short of a miracle. ~ Nikola Tesla

Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature ... Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Patience is the most valuable trait of the endgame player. ~ Pal Benko

Creativity is our one ubiquitous commonality so perhaps that is where all constructive communication should begin. ~ Ken Poirot

No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory. ~ Murray Rothbard

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure. ~ Michael H. Long

See where Congress passed a two billion dollar bill to relieve bankers' mistakes. You can always count on us helping those who have lost part of their fortune, but our whole history records nary a case where the loan was for the man who had absolutely nothing. Our theory is to help only those who can get along, even if they don't get a loan. ~ Will Rogers

Studies show that children and adults who are securely attached tend to be more curious and open to new information
than people who are not. It's another tenet of attachment theory that if you have someone in your life who listens to you and who you feel connected to, then the safer you feel stepping out in the world and interacting with others. You know you will be okay if you hear something or find out things that upset you because you have someone, somewhere, you can confide in and
who will relieve your distress. It's called having a secure base, and it's a bulwark against loneliness. ~ Kate Murphy

They say that a director always makes the same film. I try to make, as François Truffaut said, the next film in opposition to the one that came before. I'm not sure if I succeed. To put it another way, I agree with the auteur theory, but I don't consider myself an auteur. I'm more of an artisan, a craftsman. ~ Alain Resnais

We find, counterintuitively, that a small population correlates with shorter humans, and a larger population correlates with taller humans. This only makes sense in light of the FSM theory of gravity. With more people on earth today, there are fewer Noodly Appendages to go around, so we each receive less touching - pushing down toward the earth - and thus, with less force downward, we're taller. ~ Bobby Henderson

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. ~ Erich Fromm

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

Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes. ~ Thomas J. Scheff

We shall see that the mathematical treatment of the subject [of electricity] has been greatly developed by writers who express themselves in terms of the 'Two Fluids' theory. Their results, however, have been deduced entirely from data which can be proved by experiment, and which must therefore be true, whether we adopt the theory of two fluids or not. The experimental verification of the mathematical results therefore is no evidence for or against the peculiar doctrines of this theory. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

While an increasing number of male academic, political, and cultural figures have felt comfortable enough in recent years to proclaim themselves feminists, absorbing aspects of feminist politics and theory into their thinking, their gestures are most often built on an essentialized and static dichotomy between men and women. But men must do more than admit their complicity in patriarchy; they must begin to rethink the very boundaries that shape and define what it means to be a man.

Conversely, women must play an important part in this reevaluation, an idea suggest by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwikc's admonition that "when something is about masculinity, it isn't always 'about men'." Far from being just about men, the idea of masculinity engages, inflects, and shapes everyone. ~ Maurice Berger

He then expounded a remarkable theory, which had occurred to him while he was playing the clarinet during one of the power cuts that the French electricity board arranges at regular intervals. Electricity, he said, is a matter of science and logic. Classical music is a matter of art and logic. Vous voyez? Already one sees a common factor. And when you listen to the disciplined and logical progression of some of Mozart's work, the conclusion is inescapable: Mozart would have made a formidable electrician. ~ Peter Mayle

Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. ~ Douglas Adams

At what point will I be able to write an e-mail to my grandson in Bahrain merely by thinking it?"

"Thinking it?" Alif smiled contemptuously. "I expect never. Quantum computing will be the next thing, but I don't think it will be capable of transcribing thought."

"Quantum? Oh dear, I've never heard of that."

It will use qubits instead of-well, that's kind of complicated. Regular computers use a binary language to figure things out and talk to each other-ones and zeroes. Quantum computers could use ones and zeroes in an unlimited number of states, so in theory, they could store massive amounts of data and perform tasks that regular computers can't perform."

"States?"

"Positions in space and time. Ways of being."

"Now it is you who are metaphysical. Let me rephrase what I think you have said in language from my own field of study: they say that each word in the Quran has seven thousand layers of meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction. Is this similar to what you mean?"

"Yes," he said. "That is exactly what I mean. I've never heard anybody make that comparison. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Life is so unlike theory. ~ Anthony Trollope

Don't let anybody tell you it's corporations and businesses create jobs. You know that old theory, 'trickle-down economics.' That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly. ~ Hillary Clinton

The popularity of conspiracy theories is explained by people's desire to believe that there is - some group of folks who know what they're doing ~ Damon Knight

Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories. ~ Anonymous

My theory was that readers just thought they cared nothing but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialog and description. The things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers. ~ Raymond Chandler

In my profession more generally, it's not an exaggeration to say that masculinity is viewed as the root of all evil. If you were to take a literary theory course, you might think it would be about literature, but it's really not. It's about all the various forms of oppression on earth and how we can see them playing out in literary works. And behind all these forms of oppression is a guy. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world. ~ Alison Gopnik

[D]espite what our intuition tells us, changes in the world's population are not generally neutral. They are either a good thing or a bad thing. But it is uncertain even what form a correct theory of the value of population would take. In the area of population, we are radically uncertain. We do not know what value to set on changes in the world's population. If the population shrinks as a result of climate change, we do not know how to evaluate that change. Yet we have reason to think that changes in population may be one of the most morally significant effects of climate change. The small chance of catastrophe may be a major component in the expected value of harm caused by climate change, and the loss of population may be a major component of the badness of catastrophe.

How should we cope with this new, radical sort of uncertainty? Uncertainty was the subject of chapter 7. That chapter came up with a definitive answer: we should apply expected value theory. Is that not the right answer now? Sadly it is not, because our new sort of uncertainty is particularly intractable. In most cases of uncertainty about value, expected value theory simply cannot be applied.

When an event leads to uncertain results, expected value theory requires us first to assign a value to each of the possible results it may lead to. Then it requires us to calculate the weighted average value of the results, weighted by their probabilities. This gives us the event's expected value ~ John Broome

I have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. ~ Oscar Wilde