Abstract Theory Quotes

The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic.

All theory, my friend, is grey, But green is life's glad golden tree.

Obama's attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants 'someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,' he said, but someone who has 'empathy.' In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.

Scarcely anyone who comprehends this theory can escape its magic.

That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.

Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively.

Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.

I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.

Though a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.

For quite a while I have set for myself the rule if a theoretician says 'universal' it just means pure nonsense.

For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible.