There is nothing so practical as a good theory. — Kurt Lewin
It is theory that decides what can be observed. — Albert Einstein
Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides. — Ruth Hubbard
Man, the molecule of society, is the subject of social science. — Henry Charles Carey
[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice. — Michel Foucault
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. — Karl Marx
Theory is good for the intellect, but action is good for the soul. It's also good for your mental health, your physical health, and your pocketbook. — Robert Ringer
Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory. — Louis Althusser
Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence. — Louis Althusser
Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history. — Todd Gitlin
With sociology one can do anything and call it work — Malcolm Bradbury
Critical reflection on practice is a requirement of the relationship between theory and practice. Otherwise theory becomes simply "blah, blah, blah, " and practice, pure activism. — Paulo Freire
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. — Bertrand Russell
Short Social Theory Quotes
Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them — Bruno Latour
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play. — Immanuel Kant
The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden. — Pierre Bourdieu
A theory that you can't explain to a bartender is probably no damn good. — Ernest Rutherford
Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. — Louis Althusser
Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.
Political Theory Quotes
The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. — Kwame Nkrumah
For the record, feminism by definition is: 'The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.' — Emma Watson
Internationalism is a social and political theory, a certain concept of how human society ought to be organized, and in particular a concept of how the nations ought to organize their mutual relations. — Christian Lous Lange
The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Einstein, which is in the domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts - and not absolute and general. — Jiang Zemin
Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve. — Noam Chomsky
Christianity is not a political theory. It is not even a cultural theory. It is, at its root, all about changing the heart of each man and woman, boy and girl, so that we begin to think God's thoughts and act in accordance with his character. — Ravi Zacharias
Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxims, Laissez-faire and 'Pas trop gouverner' are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least. — George Fitzhugh
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
I was a man who was lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba's political crisis...; discovering Marxism...was like finding a map in the forest. — Fidel Castro
Parkinson's Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day. It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow. — C. Northcote Parkinson
Scientific Theory Quotes
A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. — Karl Popper
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage. — Mark Russell
It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. — Paul Dirac
The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory. — Arthur Eddington
About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power. — Sidney Altman
With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on. — Fritjof Capra
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 — Fritjof Capra
I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious ideas of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. — Thomas A. Edison
The farther the experiment is from theory, the closer it is to the Nobel Prize. — Irene Joliot-Curie
The greatest discoveries of science have always been those that forced us to rethink our beliefs about the universe and our place in it. — Robert L. Park
Social Science Quotes
Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval. — Naval Ravikant
At different times I taught humanities, social sciences and pre-vocational education. — Estelle Morris
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway
The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation. — Peter Ustinov
I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information. — Irvine Welsh
The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't. — Ernest Rutherford
In any profession, 90% of people are clueless but work by situational imitation, narrow mimicry and semi-conscious role-playing. Except social science and journalism where it is 99% and 100%, respectively. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The opposite of education is not ignorance; it is education in social science. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
We are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution ... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdated methods on either side of industry. — Harold Wilson
Economic Theory Quotes
Don't let anybody tell you it's corporations and businesses that create jobs. — Hillary Clinton
Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy — what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows. — John Kenneth Galbraith
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. — John Rawls
Unless we understand what it is that leads to economic and financial instability, we cannot prescribe -- make policy -- to modify or eliminate it. Identifying a phenomenon is not enough; we need a theory that makes instability a normal result in our economy and gives us handles to control it. — Hyman Minsky
Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study. — John Kenneth Galbraith
It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory. — David Stockman
Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally. — Christian Lous Lange
We are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains. — Dan Ariely
The economic and social theories used by those who take part in the social struggle ought to be judged not by their objective value but primarily for their effectiveness in arousing emotions. The scientific refutation of them which can be made is useless, however correct it may be objectively. — Vilfredo Pareto
Like all social theories, internationalism must seek its basis in the economic and technical fields; here are to be found the most profound and the most decisive factors in the development of society. — Christian Lous Lange
Sociological Quotes
According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise. — C. Wright Mills
The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood. — Pierre Bourdieu
History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim. — Robert Anton Wilson
Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process – moving from “traditional” to “modern” society – but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them. — Stephen Kotkin
Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other. — David Riesman
The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of. — Zygmunt Bauman
The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department. — Thomas Sowell
The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism. — David Talbot
Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables. — Anatol Rapoport
Social Systems Quotes
There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery — Karl Marx
A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young. — John Dewey
The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. — Michel Foucault
Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system. — Dorothy Day
To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. — Thurgood Marshall
A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect — Vann R. Newkirk II
No social system will bring us happiness, health and prosperity unless it is inspired by something greater than materialism. — Clement Attlee
Inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women will enjoy equal rights, resulting from an upheaval in the means of production and in all social relations. Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them. — Thomas Sankara
Education must be a great equaliser in our society. It must be the tool to level the differences that our various social systems have created over the past thousands of years. — Rajiv Gandhi
We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us. — Jacque Fresco
Social Construct Quotes
Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed. — Judith Butler
There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism. — Toni Morrison
The Hell of Regret He who wins the race cannot run with the pack. And once you get out you can't come back, because caged lions don't mate with free ones! If ever you are going to win, you
must forsake the social construct of the cage and all the cage dwellers. — T. D. Jakes
According to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.... The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy and revives the Leninist concept of socialist construction both in theory and in practice. We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy. — Mikhail Gorbachev
The roster of Nobel Peace Prize winners, though it has some strange people on it from time to time, tends to feature folks who fought for social justice in a nonviolent and constructive way somehow. — Guy Burgess
The Neurosciences do not exist exclusively to understand man's nature. They also serve a social function, such as in the treatment of the cerebral diseases or when helping us to have a more pleasant and constructive life. It is a thing that one could explore well. — Rodolfo Llinas
Like anything, you just need to stay true to who you are and hope that social constructs don't get in the way of accomplishing your goals. — Tinashe
Femininity and masculinity are social constructs. Female and male are biological. We don't have to learn to be men or women but we do have to learn to be ladies and gentlemen. — Rita Mae Brown
Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context. — danah boyd
The food to me is just a hook, it's a button, it happens to be the social construct and the cultural totem that I'm most familiar with. So of course I built the show around food because it's where I'm familiar. — Andrew Zimmern
Love Theories Quotes
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. — Theodore Roosevelt
My best film is always my next film. I couldn't make Chungking Express now, because of the way I live and drink I've forgotten how I did it. I don't believe in film school or film theory. Just try and get in there and make the bloody film, do good work and be with people you love. — Christopher Doyle
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. — Gilbert K. Chesterton
I've got a theory: if you love your workspace, you'll love your work a little more. — Cynthia Rowley
Attachment theory helps us understand the dynamics of love and relationships beyond just the superficial. — Amir Levine
The wise woman patterns her life on the theory and practice of modern banking. She never gives her love, but only lends it on the best security and at the highest rate of interest. — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I'll end up loving your theory. — John Archibald Wheeler
Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values. — Abraham Maslow
Perhaps the greatest contribution that those of us who come from a Christian tradition can make is to throw out the old just-war theory, embrace the nonviolence of Jesus, refuse to kill one another, and truly follow his commandment to "love our enemies. — Mairead Corrigan
My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws. — Ida Tarbell
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all. — Alexis de Tocqueville
As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism. — Rose Wilder Lane
Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism. — Vladimir Lenin
If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it. — Albert Bandura
In social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy results from diverse sources of information conveyed vicariously and through social evaluation, as well as through direct experience — Albert Bandura
Stock prices are likely to be among the prices that are relatively vulnerable to purely social movements because there is no accepted theory by which to understand the worth of stocks....investors have no model or at best a very incomplete model of behavior of prices, dividend, or earnings, of speculative assets. — Robert J. Shiller
If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power. — Imre Lakatos
What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up. — John Taylor Gatto
Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave. — Ellen Willis
The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority. — Ludwig von Mises
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing. — Roland Barthes
The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome-not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable. — Thomas Huxley
The term "Socialism" becomes a common label for the various theories of attack upon the principle of property, the various policies of communal control at the expense of the family and individual freedom. — Hilaire Belloc
Explicit knowledge, conventionally delivered like pizza (neat boxes with toppings of concepts, theories, best practices and war stories), is consumed by the brain but not metabolized into action. The learning we call intuition, know-how and common sense gets into the blood stream through osmosis. It is shaped by social context. — Richard Pascale
Finding Mecca in America weaves social theory and concrete ethnography into a significant contribution on Muslims in the United States, illuminating broader questions about the integration of minority and immigrant groups along the way. This is an important work and a joy to read. — Eboo Patel
Only now are increasing numbers of political and social scientists beginning to realize that Kelso's theories provide a private-property-based alternative to the imminent passage of a government-distributed "guaranteed income" or "negative income tax." — Hazel Henderson
Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. — Cass Sunstein
ANARCHISM:The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. — Emma Goldman
In the appendix to my History of the Russian Revolution I give a detailed and documented study of the ideas of the Bolshevik party on the October revolution. This study, I hope, will make it impossible in the future to ascribe to [Vladimir] Lenin the theory of Socialism in a single country. — Leon Trotsky
No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect... To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches. — Margaret Thatcher
The history of science should not be an instrument to defend any kind of social or philosophic theory; it should be used only for its own purpose, to illustrate impartially the working of reason against unreason, the gradual unfolding of truth, in all its forms, whether pleasant or unpleasant, useful of useless, welcome or unwelcome. — George Sarton
As far as social-economic theory is concerned, I am still a Marxist — Dalai Lama
Whether statistics be an art or a science... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test. — Adolphe Quetelet
Regarding homophobia in general, the good news is that there is a lot less of it than there used to be. The bad news is that it ever existed in the first place, and the worse news is that it remains far stronger than is healthy for a society dedicated in theory to equality under the law. — Barney Frank
I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory. — Paul Farmer
If you look at a lot of traditional societies, they're all organized along what we might call anarchist guidelines, but it's not like the Zapatistas were reading European social theory. — Rebecca Solnit
The theory of the permanent revolution, in contradiction to the theory of socialism in one country, was recognized by the entire Bolshevik party during the period from 1917 to 1923. — Leon Trotsky
With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal. — Richard K. Morgan
The theory of animal rights simply is not consistent with the theory of animal welfare... Animal rights means dramatic social changes for humans and non-humans alike; if our bourgeois values prevent us from accepting those changes, then we have no right to call ourselves advocates of animal rights. — Gary L. Francione
Theory and practice are not only interwoven with one’s culture but with the responsibility of shaping the environment, of breaking up social complacency, and challenging the power of the status quo. — Samuel Mockbee
Since the most important element of any concept is that its originating question be appropriately framed, any theory demanding an explanation for homosexuality is a problematic one because it maintains our existence as a category of deviance. I mean, no one is running around trying to figure out why some people like sports, for example. — Sarah Schulman
Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change. — Thomas Sowell
The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority. — Theodor Adorno
Anarchism, the great leaven of thought, is today permeating every phase of human endeavor.... It is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual. It is the theory of social harmony. It is the great, surging, living truth that is reconstructing the world, and that will usher in the Dawn. — Emma Goldman
All social life is essentially practical. All mysterious which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of the practice. — Karl Marx
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