Capitalism is a great idea in theory, but in practice it just doesn't work.
There's always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.
I don't like to move abstract theoretical policies that, on a white paper, sound good. If I wanted to do that, I'd be a professor.
Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
In my relativity theory I set up a clock at every point in space, but in reality I find it difficult to provide even one clock in my room.
I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what I have always said in theory - Wait God's will.
Every form of government has its advantages and inconveniences inseparable from it. It would be in vain to seek for a government absolutely perfect; and however perfect it might appear in speculation, yet it is certain, that in practice, and under the administration of men, it will ever be attended with some particular defects.
In theory it may seem all right to some, but when it comes to being made the instrument of the Lord's vengeance, I myself don't like it.
Should we have a leader or should we think for ourselves? Obviously the latter in principle. But-sometimes there lies a gulf between what is theoretically right and that which is practical.
In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught;but in life there are many things to draw us aside.
What the left says sounds very good but, in practice, it works out very badly.
Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water in a reservoir ... My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a drop of water fifty yards from the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!
I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.
I couldn't reconcile what I was being taught at the university of Chicago, the lectures and the books I was being assigned, with what I knew to be true out in the streets.
Academics act like they are important, but when something is academic it is meaningless. People say, 'It's academic, now let's get work done.'
You can write anything you want on paper, like blowing up the bridge on the River Kwai, but when you actually have to do that as a director, it's not the same. Ninety percent of directing is not creative - it's putting the theoretical into the practical world.
Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.
The science of mathematics performs more than it promises, but the science of metaphysics promises more than it performs.
