The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem
“Never question another man's motive. His wisdom, yes, but not his motives.”
Attorney-General v. Kerr (1840), 2 Beav. 428.
Quote
Introduction, p. 3
Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters
“One of man’s important mistakes, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I.”
In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: One of man’s important mistakes, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I.
Man such as we know him, the "man-machine," the man who cannot "do," and with whom and through whom everything "happens," cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 420.
"Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals," section 11: The purpose of ordinal logics (1938), published in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, series 2, vol. 45 (1939)
In a footnote to the first sentence, Turing added: "We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions."
Context: Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.
“Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.”
Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973)
“The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.”
Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter II, The Economic Revolution, p. 15
Context: It may strike us as odd that the idea of gain is a relatively modern one; we are schooled to believe that man is essentially an acquisitive creature and that left to himself he will behave as any self-respecting businessman would. The profit motive, we are constantly being told, is as old as man himself.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
