How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.
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"On What There Is"Willard van Orman Quine
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Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job and they are not held to any higher standard (though perhaps Derrida can legitimately claim some credit for originality in inventing the formula in the first place).
Jacques Derrida
It's strange that all birds don't fly in the same way . . . I've heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own . . . All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.
Halldor Laxness
"The banks don't have anything - no rights whatsoever. The banks are shareholders of SLEC, and SLEC has no rights. ... I am the CEO of Formula One Management and Formula One Administration, which runs the business in F1. From this point of view, I own F1."
Bernie Ecclestone
"The federal poverty measurement ... hasn't been changed since it was first introduced in 1964. ... [T]he formula [doesn't] indicate that we've made any gains in fighting poverty. ... [Yet] we have made real progress in fighting poverty and raising living standards since the 70s. ... The poverty formula ... is bankrupt."
Michael Bloomberg
The theologians who took up the work which the first reformers had laid down soon came to consider intolerance as a main evidence of spiritual life: erelong they were using all their powers in crushing every germ of new thought. Their theory was simply that the world had now reached its climax; that the religion of Luther was the final word of God to man; that everything depended upon keeping it absolutely pure; that men might comment upon it in hundreds of pulpits and lecture rooms and in thousands of volumes;—but change it in the slightest particle—never. And in order that it might never be changed it was petrified into rituals and creeds and catechisms and statements, and, above all, in 1579, into the "Formula of Concord," which, as more than one thoughtful man has since declared, turned out to be a "formula of discord."
Andrew Dickson White
Quine, Willard van Orman
Quinlan, John
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