Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But the fact a person denies that he is theorising is no reason for taking him at his word and failing to investigate what implicit theory is involved in his statements.
A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.
The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
A theory must be tempered with reality.
To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.
Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
To be intellectual does not require one to be alienated and oppositional.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
Never abandon a theory that explains something until you have a theory that explains more.