"If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let's see it."
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Principles quotes
Principles
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Principles quotes (page 37 of 117)
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"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."
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"Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis."
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"It's a principle that anything our leaders do is for noble reasons. It may be mistaken, it may be ugly, but basically noble. And if you bring in normal moderate, conservative, strategic, economic objectives you threatening that principle."
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"To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible."
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"To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses."
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"Capitalism is based on the principle that everything has to be privately owned; it can't be held in common. There is even a dogma, which is today called, the "tragedy of the commons" which holds that if things are held in common they are going to be destroyed. If they're privatized, like you give them to Bechtel or Monsanto or ExxonMobil, then they'll be preserved because that's the capitalist's religion."
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"While I think in principle people should not have irrational beliefs, I should say that as a matter of fact, it is people who hold what I regard as completely irrational beliefs who are among the most effective moral actors in the world, in many respects. They're among the worst, but also among the best, even though the moral beliefs are ostensibly the same."
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"I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years. I don't see it as a principle, it's a tactic. And I felt I had exhausted its potential as a tactic right about then, so I stopped."
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"If you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with all of its applications."
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"We have always found that, if the principles were right, the area over which they were affected did not matter. Size is only a matter of the multiplication table."
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"We have lost faith in the formal powers of the mind, not, as some suppose, because our universe is too difficult to grasp, but because we lack the inner principle of order."
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"A marciful Providunce fashioned us holler O' purpose thet we might our principles swaller."
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"Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well paid in the end."
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"Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too. Principle of Christian charity."
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"The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity."
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"He who knows not how to plant his will in things at least endows them with some meaning: that is to say, he believes that a will is already present in them (A principle of faith.)"
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"The weak and misbegotten shall perish: first principle of our brotherly love. And they shall be given every assistance."
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"Originality is another criterion of aesthetic value. We may formulate an originality principle, according to which highly valuable works of art provide hitherto unavailable insights.... Notice that, although originality is a necessary condition of high aesthetic value, it is far from a sufficient condition. Many original works have little or no aesthetic value. An artwork may present a novel but uninteresting perspective, or one that is original but wrong."
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"You cannot have a theory without principles. Principles is another name for prejudices."
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