Famous quotes containing the words social, pragmatic and/or theories:
“... spinsterhood [is considered to be] an abnormality of small proportions and small consequence, something like an extra finger or two on the body, presumably of temporary duration, and never of any social significance.”
—Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906)
“When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“Our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)