Thesis Motivation Quotes

You, my dear ... have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven't said as much, it's been on your mind. Am I right?' She nodded. 'Yes. And I'm not going to offer a long motivational thesis - the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you need only say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)

One of our Church educators published what he purports to be a history of the Church's stand on the question of organic evolution. His thesis challenges the integrity of a prophet of God. He suggests that Joseph Fielding Smith published his work, Man: His Origin and Destiny, against the counsel of the First Presidency and his own Brethren. This writer's interpretation is not only inaccurate, but it also runs counter to the testimony of Elder Mark E. Petersen, who wrote this foreword to Elder Smith's book, a book I would encourage all to read. Elder Petersen said: Some of us [members of the Council of the Twelve] urged [Elder Joseph Fielding Smith] to write a book on the creation of the world and the origin of man.... The present volume is the result. It is a most remarkable presentation of material from both sources [science and religion] under discussion. It will fill a great need in the Church and will be particularly invaluable to students who have become confused by the misapplication of information derived from scientific experimentation. When one understands that the author to whom I alluded is an exponent of the theory of organic evolution, his motive in disparaging President Joseph Fielding Smith becomes apparent. To hold to a private opinion on such matters is one thing, but when one undertakes to publish his views to discredit the work of a prophet, it is a very serious matter. It is also apparent to all who have the Spirit of God in them that Joseph Fielding Smith's writings will stand the test of time.

This revolution of values must go beyond traditional capitalism and Communism. We must honestly admit that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encourage smallhearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity. The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to be more I-centered than thou-centered. Equally, Communism reduces men to a cog in the wheel of the state. The Communist may object, saying that in Marxian theory the state is an “interim reality” that will “wither away” when the classless society emerges. True—in theory; but it is also true that, while the state lasts, it is an end in itself. Man is a means to that end. He has no inalienable rights. His only rights are derived from, and conferred by, the state. Under such a system the fountain of freedom runs dry. Restricted are man’s liberties of press and assembly, his freedom to vote and his freedom to listen and to read. Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of Communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.

By concentrating almost exclusively on thesis-support exposition in college composition classes, we are implicitly teaching that the ability to support an assertion is more important than the ability to examine an issue.

The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s motivated physicists to tackle all the unsolved problems of physics with the new methods and see if they worked (they mostly did). But what was the evidence for any of this new way of thinking? The evidence that was persuasive at the time was a number of rather abstract physics experiments concerning the nature of atomic spectra or the interaction between light and metal surfaces. Each was important in its own way, but what ought to have played an important role in retrospect was something far, far simpler: the observation that magnets work. The crucial step was made by an unknown Dutch scientist called Hendreka van Leeuwen, and what she showed was that magnets couldn’t exist if you just use classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics. Hendreka van Leeuwen’s doctoral work in Leiden was done under the supervision of Lenz and the work was published in the Journal de Physique et le Radium in 1921. Unfortunately, it subsequently transpired that her main result had been anticipated by Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, but as it had only appeared in his 1911 diploma thesis, written in Danish, it was unsurprising she hadn’t known about it. Their contribution, though conceived independently, is now known as the Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem, which states that if you assume nothing more than classical physics, and then go on to model a material as a system of electrical charges, then you can show that the system can have no net magnetization; in other words, it will not be magnetic. Simply put, there are no lodestones in a purely classical Universe.

According to Shweder and his colleagues (1997), purity norms can govern a range of issues, including what foods can be eaten, who is fit and unfit to prepare them, and how foods must be cleaned or treated before they can be eaten. Purity norms also address the specifics of which sexual activities are permissible and what is forbidden, deviant, or “dirty”; allowable and inappropriate sleeping arrangements involving the members of nuclear and extended families; what sorts of clothes can and cannot be worn at different times or in specific places and settings, especially in temples and other sacred locations, or during religious rituals; how a range of organic matter, such as corpses, blood, feces, and so on, should properly be dealt with to avoid the risk of pollution; and which other social groups one can interact with, as well as how and when it is permissible to interact with them, and how to avoid becoming tainted by members of “lower” groups. The subject matter of the issues governed by such norms shows a fairly clear affinity with the subject matter regulated by disgust, and the defining contrast between purity, on the one hand, and dirt and contamination, on the other, further implicates the emotion. The Co-opt thesis holds that disgust will provide the motivation for individuals to comply with purity norms that they have acquired, and that disgust also shapes the punitive motivations that are directed at violators. Initial experimental evidence has begun to flesh out this picture in more detail (Rozin et al. 1999).

There is a clear and simple implication of the thesis that most violence is morally motivated to regulate relationships in accord with cultural implementations of the four fundamental RMs: to reduce violence we must make it immoral.

Please allow this book to offer one piece of serious advice (don't worry, this is the only one): Take control. Decide that enough is enough. Stop waiting for your advisor to guide your work - write a paper using your own brain and slap it down on his or her desk. Study - really, actually study - what it is you're studying. Realize that you can't include everything in your thesis, and drop your lofty and unrealistic plan to transform the field. You won't. Plan what you need to do to graduate, write it down, sit with the person whose approval you need, and work up a timeline. Seek out interesting conferences, and if your department won't pay for you to attend them, search for outside sponsorship. (You have the freaking internet, for crying out loud.) Actively pursue your goals, because - and it's so easy to forget this - that's why you're here. Can't find the motivation to work today? Tough shit. It's like a snow day: Every day off you give yourself makes you feel good that day, but it's one more day you'll have to make up in June when you really want to be out of school. It's possible that many graduate programs want you to get depressed, say "Fuck it" and take charge of your own destiny. They may consider this part of your necessary struggle. Well, so be it. Wait no longer. Take charge now. And get on with your stupid, stupid career.

James’s thesis that there are four motives for murder: fear, revenge, passion, and greed. Cases involving the progeny of well-to-do families tend toward the latter two.

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

Mifsud notes that J. D. Evans had graduated from Cambridge in 1949 and that in the early 1950s he was 'in desperate need of a PhD'. The thesis that the future Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of London chose to develop, influenced by the Italian archaeologist Barnarbo Brea, was that the very first human inhabitants of the previously unpeopled Malta had been immigrants from the Neolithic Stentinello culture of Sicily -- a theory that is still part of the conventional academic wisdom about Malta today. In pursuing this thesis, Mifsud suggests, it was not convenient to the young Evans to have to deal with the evidence of the Ghar Dalam teeth that suggested a prior, Palaeolithic, human presence in Malta. This, then, either as a conscious or unconscious motive, could explain why Evans was so vehement in his attacks on the antiquity of the taurodonts [that could belong to Neanderthals] and so economical with the truth in his published statements about them. He wanted them out of the way -- permanently -- of his own theory about Malta's first inhabitants.

Mormon-black relations. This work’s central thesis was that two factors drove Brigham Young to implement the Church’s black ban by 1852. Most important was a developing sense of Mormon “whiteness” wherein Latter-day Saints identified themselves as a divinely “chosen” people, while conversely labeling blacks a biblically cursed race, given their skin color and alleged descent from the accursed biblical counter-figures of Cain, Ham, and Canaan. Further motivating Young was his embrace of black slavery, which he considered divinely sanctioned. Thus as Utah Territorial Governor he called for its legalization—this occurring in February 1852, shortly following Mormon migration to the Great Basin. Utah became the only western territory to approve slavery. Young in calling for this statute claimed a divinely sanctioned link between black servitude and black priesthood denial—the latter practice made public for the first time in his 1852 statement calling for black slavery. The dissertation also drew a number of conclusions relative to the perpetuation of the black priesthood and temple ban. The ban was firmly established by the time of Brigham Young’s death in 1877, given that the Mormon leader repeatedly affirmed its divine legitimacy over the previous quarter century. Further assuring perpetuation of the ban was official LDS embrace of the historical myth that Joseph Smith established the restriction. Such mythmaking received scriptural justification through canonization of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, a work consisting of the Books of Moses and Abraham. All such developments made the subordinate status of Mormon blacks virtually “irreversible by 1880,” enabling the ban to continue unchanged into the mid-1970s.13

Once Trump had won, a panicked punditburo swung into action, insisting in a crescendo of consensus that trade had little to do with the country’s deindustrialization; that it was pretty much all due to technological factors; that what happened to manufacturing workers was therefore unavoidable. After the dust had settled, many commentators changed their mind on this question, quietly acknowledging the disastrous consequences of ill-crafted trade deals. But what matters for our purposes is the initial reaction, which was virtually unanimous and unfolded along the same lines as in 1896: the rationality of working-class grievances had to be denied.12 The outcome of the 2016 election, the same punditburo insisted, could not and must not be explained by reference to economic factors or to long-term, class-related trends. Yes, lots of Trump voters said they were motivated by economic concerns; yes, Trump talked about economic issues all the time; and yes, the economic stagnation of Trump-voting areas is obvious to anyone who has gone there. And also: every time our post-partisan liberal leaders deregulated banks and then turned around and told working-class people that their misfortunes were attributable to their poor education … every time they did this and then thought to themselves, “They have nowhere else to go” … they made the Trump disaster a little more likely. But to acknowledge those plain facts was to come dangerously close to voicing the intolerable heresy that the D.C. opinion cartel dubbed the “economic anxiety” thesis—the idea that people voted for Trump out of understandable worries about wages or opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization. The reason this was intolerable, one suspects, is because it suggested that there was a rational element to certain groups’ support for Trump and also that there was something less than A+ about the professional-class Camelot over which the Democrats presided for eight years.

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modified the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiquity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra-epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap forwards.