“I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”

cue Python sketch: "Upper Class Twit of the Year"
From PBS series Monty Python's Personal Best: John Cleese's Personal Best (2006), playing role of senile old man.

Aphorism 50
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.

From PBS series Monty Python's Personal Best: John Cleese's Personal Best (2006), playing role of senile old man.

Letter to Giovanni Boccaccio (28 April 1373) as quoted in Petrarch : The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898) edited by James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe, p. 417
Context: I certainly will not reject the praise you bestow upon me for having stimulated in many instances, not only in Italy but perhaps beyond its confines also, the pursuit of studies such as ours, which have suffered neglect for so many centuries; I am, indeed, almost the oldest of those among us who are engaged in the cultivation of these subjects. But I cannot accept the conclusion you draw from this, namely, that I should give place to younger minds, and, interrupting the plan of work on which I am engaged, give others an opportunity to write something, if they will, and not seem longer to desire to reserve everything for my own pen. How radically do our opinions differ, although, at bottom, our object is the same! I seem to you to have written everything, or at least a great deal, while to myself I appear to have produced almost nothing.

Alfred P. Sloan (1936); Cited in: &quot; OBITUARY : Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Dead at 90; G.M. Leader and Philanthropist http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0523.html,&quot; the New York Times, February 18, 1966. This article comments:<br>Toward the end of the year [1936] Mr. Sloan made a substantial foray into philanthropy by endowing the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with $10-million.

The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman

Tbilisi Courtroom Address (2021)

&quot;The Rise and Fall of the City&quot; (23 November 2005) at the Ludwig von Mises Institute http://www.mises.org/story/1959