Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian
Source: The mechanization of the world picture, 1961, p. 499
Preface
God Created the Integers (2007)
Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian
Source: The mechanization of the world picture, 1961, p. 499
Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist
Source: Math for the Layman (1999), Ch. 10, §D
Daniel Alan Vallero (1953) American scientist
Acceptance speech, Alumni Achievement Award, Collinsville, Illinois. 2017.
Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator
The Meaning of Education and other Essays and Addresses https://books.google.com/books?id=H9cKAAAAIAAJ (1898) p. 45 as quoted by Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath's Quotation-book https://books.google.com/books?id=G0wtAAAAYAAJ (1914)
Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian
—Walter Eugene Clark ,.Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.
Vladimir I. Arnold (1937–2010) Russian mathematician
"Will Mathematics Survive? Report on the Zurich Congress" in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 17, no. 3 (1995), pp. 6–10.
Context: At the beginning of this century a self-destructive democratic principle was advanced in mathematics (especially by Hilbert), according to which all axiom systems have equal right to be analyzed, and the value of a mathematical achievement is determined, not by its significance and usefulness as in other sciences, but by its difficulty alone, as in mountaineering. This principle quickly led mathematicians to break from physics and to separate from all other sciences. In the eyes of all normal people, they were transformed into a sinister priestly caste... Bizarre questions like Fermat's problem or problems on sums of prime numbers were elevated to supposedly central problems of mathematics.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer
Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)
Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland
Scotland and Northern Ireland (June 18, 2007)