The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect.

The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

I was never a monist - always a diversitarian.

Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.

Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process... has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

In the little hall leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers, tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper. The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

Some of you may have been hoping that today I would speak about Lucien Bouchard's latest economic theories. But I have decided to spare him for the time being: after all, he is a man.

I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.

Many writers upon the science of political economy have declared that it is the duty of a nation first to encourage the creation of wealth; and second, to direct and control its distribution. All such theories are delusive.

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

I know my theories and findings are hard for you to accept because they are so original and extraordinary.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.

Theories pass. The frog remains.

The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.

And the continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones.

Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.

I think the point to be understood is that we're all different. I've never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn't go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, 'This is the way you should act.'

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

Theories are patterns without value. What counts is action.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.

Before I married, I had three theories about raising children and no children. Now, I have three children and no theories.

Theories of love are found in the works of scientists, philosophers, and theologians.

Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.

In other words, unlike some people with new theories, we will go out, we'll go into a school and we get products and the products are evaluated, whether it's by teachers or others. The scores are quantified and then we compare performances.

No religious position is loyally served by refusing to consider annoying theories which may well turn out to be facts.

The Secret Doctrine is the common property of the countless millions of men born under various climates, in times with which History refuses to deal, and to which esoteric teachings assign dates incompatible with the theories of Geology and Anthropology.