Words matter. These are the best Theory Quotes from famous people such as G. Stanley Hall, Mo Ibrahim, Jerry Seinfeld, Robert Mapplethorpe, Geoffrey West, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Every theory of love, from Plato down, teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.
The state and its elites must be subject, in theory and in practice, to the same laws that its poorest citizens are.
My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.
My theory about creativity is that the more money one has, the more creative one can be.
My provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious, scientific theory of cities and scientific theory means quantifiable, relying on underlying generic principles that can be made in a – put into a predictive framework. That’s the quest.
We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
I always had the theory that if you have a dream, chase it. And I’m chasing it.
Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.
It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
The Popish theory, which assumes that Christ, the Apostles and believers, constituted the Church while our Saviour was on earth, and this organization was designed to be perpetual.
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science.
Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.
I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards – Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.
But the scientific importance of a change in knowledge of fact consists precisely in j its having consequences for a system of theory.
Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.
No matter how beautiful the theory, one irritating fact can dismiss the entire formulism, so it has to be proven.
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.
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.
Is the universe ‘elegant,’ as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant – if I only knew what they were.
The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.
String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.
I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.
There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true.
In New Classical theory, periods of declining employment – business cycle downturns – may be caused by an unexpected decline in aggregate demand, which leaves workers mistakenly holding out for nominal wages that exceed the new market-clearing level.
My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.
If you’re a physicist, for heaven’s sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn’t agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.
I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.
I have a theory. An audience doesn’t need to get wrapped up in blackness every time they see a Negro actor. And a movie doesn’t have to be about race just because there’s a Negro in it.
It is probably safe to say that all the changes of factual knowledge which have led to the relativity theory, resulting in a very great theoretical development, are completely trivial from any point of view except their relevance to the structure of a theoretical system.
My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.
Here is the real domino theory – gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you.
In 2002, a Scottish journalist, during a dinner meant to be private, absolutely wanted me to react to Stephen Hawking’s comments. I said one shouldn’t pay too much attention to what Hawking was saying because he was a celebrity but not a specialist of elementary particle theory.
As soon as we step beyond the established boundaries of pure thermodynamic theory, we enter a trackless region confronting us with obstacles which even the most astute of us are almost at a loss to tackle.
The oldest theory of contract is I think negative.
In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God’s creation… as music.
At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations.
Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy.
The lesson of my field, behavioral economics, is that we need to understand the ways in which we differ from the rational human assumed in standard economic theory.
My theory is the root of a country artist is truth and honesty. For me, I look at Sam Hunt. The truth and the honest thing is we have southern roots, we were raised in a southern way, but we listen to Drake and other stuff, too.
Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.
Essential to the theory of evolution is the premise that everything has come into being by itself.
But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the women’s movement did not either.
Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles Science and the Bible as well.
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
I coined this term ‘freedom thru limitation’ back in the ’90s because I was sick of art being treated like pop, because of this boring ‘anything can be art’ theory.
The theory that can absorb the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, generation after generation, through all changes of opinion and detail, is the one that must rule all observation.
A friend of mine had this great theory about the Teletubbies, that it’s preparing us for being mindless. And getting us ready for living in an underground world. That’s why the scenery is so flat.
The theory in great families was ‘why work if you don’t have to.’ Being a public figure was reserved for movie stars.
Beck said he didn’t believe in the theory of a song coming through you as if you were an open vessel. I agree with him to a certain extent.
There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory.
My theory is this; I’m not a political songwriter. I’m an honest songwriter.
I’m a big fan of simplicity, especially with songs and I try not to make them complicated. I just make them simple and let people absorb that message themselves. That’s my theory.