#theory

Republican theory clearly stated that the people held all political power, and only they could delegate authority to a government. The people were free to change governments at will. They didn't need permission from incumbents. ↗

— James D. Best

#james-madison #political-theory #change

[According to 1348 theorists, poisoning of Christian water by Jews was the cause of Black Death.] Even the poison used to contaminate the Christian water supply was described in meticulous detail. It was "about the size of an egg," except when it was the "size of a nut" or a "large nut," "a fist" or "two fists"- and it came packaged in "a leather pouch," except when it was packaged in "linen cloth," "a rag," or a "paper coronet"; and the poison was variously made from lizards, frogs, and spiders- when it was not made from the hearts of Christians and from Holy Communion wafers. ↗

— John Kelly

#plague #theory #death

Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it's only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don't go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing? ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#experience

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. ↗

— Leonardo da Vinci

#cast #compass #knows #like #loves

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. ↗

— Charles Simic

#literary-theory #literature #imagination

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#imagination #theory #imagination

I joined the Army and was sent to the MIT radiation laboratory after a few months of introduction to electromagnetic wave theory in a special course, given for Army personnel at the University of Chicago. ↗

— Jack Steinberger

#army #chicago #course #electromagnetic #few

Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization. ↗

— Guy Debord

#philosophy #situationists #men

In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#quantum-physics #schrodinger-s-cat #wisdom #acting

The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#literary-theory #literary-criticism