Source: The Critic as Artist
Power and Laws of Thought (c. 1870)
Preface to the Revised Edition (October, 1906)
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906)
“When you publish a book, it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.”
"A Visit with Philip Roth," interview with James Atlas, The New York Times Book Review (2 September 1979), p. BR1
Before the U. S. Senate Committee on Patents (29 January 1886)
The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy (2007), Ch. 1: Two Versions
As We May Think (1945)
Context: A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets — and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.
“There was an Indian edition of most of my books, but it didn't make much of a splash.”
On the impact of her books in India. But her publication of The Hindus: An Alternative History, a sweeping history of Hinduism from its origins in 2500 B.C. to the present, though a success, it has been controversial (this aspect has been covered in another quote above).
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus
“Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature.”
"A Generalization of Weyl's Theory of the Electromagnetic and Gravitational Fields" in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A99 (1921), p. 108
Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)
Context: The volume of the cone was discovered by Democritus... He did not prove it, he guessed it... not a blind guess, rather it was reasoned conjecture. As Archimedes has remarked, great credit is due to Democritus for his conjecture since this made proof much easier. Eudoxes... a pupil of Plato, subsequently gave a rigorous proof. Surely the labor or writing limited his manuscript to a few copies; none has survived. In those days editions did not run to thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies as modern books—especially, bad books—do. However, the substance of what he wrote is nevertheless available to us.... Euclid's great achievement was the systematization of the works of his predecessors. The Elements preserve several of Eudoxes' proofs.
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2006/11/22/6524058/jodi-picoult-you-cant-edit-a-blank-page
