“Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack.”

— Paul Erdős

As quoted in "Ramsey Theory" by Ronald L. Graham and Joel H. Spencer, in Scientific American (July 1990), p. 112-117

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Paul Erdős 18

Hungarian mathematician and freelancer 1913–1996

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Variant: Roses are red
Violets are blue
Be very afraid
We're coming for you.
Source: The Queen of Zombie Hearts

“The scale of light can be described by numbers — called the frequency — and as the numbers get higher, the light goes from red to blue to ultraviolet. We can't see ultraviolet light, but it can affect photographic plates. It's still light — only the number is different.”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 13

“We have seven colours — violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red (Roy G. Biv). Our atmosphere has a number of particles and when light falls on them, it gets scattered. With blue colour having less wavelength and more scattering qualities, it scatters and makes the sky blue. While red colour has opposite qualities than blue so traffic lights are of this colour.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

His observations on the "strange events in our solar system" and as to why the sky looked blue and red colour was used in traffic lights to signal to vehicles to stop.
When Prof Jayant Narlikar saw the sun rise in the west

“Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. …it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time… Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. …Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

“We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2004, Democratic National Convention speech (July 2004)

“When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book On Fairy-Stories

On Fairy-Stories (1939)
Context: The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power.

“I think that within five or six months’ time there will be quite a few Socialists who will recognize that I am the only Socialist that there has been in Italy for the last five years; and I am not being paradoxical, even if I add that the Socialist Party on the whole is detestable.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

“Sacrifice, Work, and Production” Speech in Milan before the Fascio Milanese Combattimento (5 February 1920) p. 69
1920s, Mussolini as Revealed in his Political Speeches (November 1914—August 1923) (1923)

“I venture to think that in future the Czechoslovak State cannot be maintained as an independent entity. You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. … It is the most grievous consequence which we have yet experienced of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years—five years of futile good intention, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defences.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/05/policy-of-his-majestys-government#column_366 in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement
The 1930s

“It’s all different. He’s Australian, I’m German. He has car number six, I have car number five, so I think there’s lots of stuff for you to write again.”

Sebastian Vettel (1987) German racing driver in Formula 1

http://www.formula1.com/news/headlines/2010/7/11062.html July 24, 2010.
About the difference between him and Mark Webber.
Sourced quotes

“No move towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes has taken place in the five or six thousand years that the world has existed.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XI, paragraph 1, lines 6-8

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Paul Erdős 18

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