“The number of people who can copulate properly may be few; the number who can write well are infinitely fewer.”

— Hugh MacDiarmid

Review of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

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Hugh MacDiarmid 5

Scottish poet, pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve 1892–1978

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 92, cited in: Erik Hollnagel (2004) Barriers and accident prevention. p. 182

“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“There can be an infinite number of polygons, but only five regular solids.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

37 min 45 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]
Context: There can be an infinite number of polygons, but only five regular solids. Four of the solids were associated with earth, fire, air and water. The cube for example represented earth. These four elements, they thought, make up terrestrial matter. So the fifth solid they mystically associated with the Cosmos. Perhaps it was the substance of the heavens. This fifth solid was called the dodecahedron. Its faces are pentagons, twelve of them. Knowledge of the dodecahedron was considered too dangerous for the public. Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron. In love with whole numbers, the Pythagoreans believed that all things could be derived from them. Certainly all other numbers.
So a crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the Pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational".

“A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say “no” but none to say “yes”. Bureaucrats can find an infinite number of reasons for rejecting any proposed change, but can find none for accepting it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (2006) A little book of f-laws: 13 common sins of management. p. 12.
2000s

“The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 9; in Ch. 22 (see below) Pirsig recounts finding that Henri Poincaré had made a similar statement decades earlier.

“To increase the speed of innovation here, we want to increase the number of people who can contribute ideas to the creative process.”

Regina E. Dugan (1963) American businesswoman, inventor, and technology developer

Fast Company interview (2011)
Context: To increase the speed of innovation here, we want to increase the number of people who can contribute ideas to the creative process. … We structure programs so that we can have diversity of involvement from universities to small businesses to large businesses to garage inventors. You're looking for the maximum number of folks who can contribute ideas to the process. So we're trying to catalyze and grab the best ideas no matter where they come from, leveraging the most modern concepts of crowdsourcing and harnessing creative power. Look at the semiconductor industry. Those companies could only keep up with Moore's law by going from hundreds of chip designers focused on eking out every last electron, to hundreds of thousands of designers throughout the industry who could excel at various pieces of the design. When you open up the process like that, the number of people and the diversity of people who can participate goes way up.