Quotes about number
page 10

“I took the position of organizing 126 Democrats who voted against the Iraq war resolution. And I happen to think it was the right position.Today we're faced with over 500 casualties, a cost of over $200 billion, and it could rise — the casualties could go into the thousands and the costs could go over a half trillion if we stay there for years, as a number of people on this stage intend to see happen.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Democratic National Candidates Debate, Goffstown, New Hampshire (22 January 2004)

War, People, Thinking

“In his defense of Ambassador John Bolton and repudiation of the United Nations and the Third World, referring to the Third World, "That latter group includes a huge number of so-called nations, little more than spots on the map that would get invaded, taken over, subsumed, eliminated, except no-one wants to get stuck with their problems of poverty, disease and corruption."”

John Gibson (media host) (1946) American radio talk show host

http://www.newshounds.us/2005/04/06/john_gibson_oozes_hate_and_contempt_for_third_world_nations_un.php

World, Disease, Problem

“I told you once that in those terms I would be considered as Ruburt's number 6 or 7 self. You had better change Ruburt to Jane in that sentence. Ruburt then, would be considered Jane's third self in approximate terms. In the analogy these future selves would dwell in other dimensions, and usually self one, or Jane, would be relatively unaware of their, existence or knowledge. In this case self one is able to make such contacts however.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 444, Page 124
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 9

Knowledge, Change, Future

“We haven't really had the time yet to pore through all those records in Baghdad. We'll find ample evidence confirming the link, that is the connection if you will between al Qaida and the Iraqi intelligence services. They have worked together on a number of occasions.”

Dick Cheney (1941) American politician and businessman

Interview with Rocky Mountain News, January 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040213072434/http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/politics/article/0,1299,DRMN_35_2565269,00.html 2000s, 2004

Intelligence, Time

“Muhammad Kasim marched from Dhalila, and encamped on the banks of the stream of the Jalwali to the east of Brahmanabad. He sent some confidential messengers to Brahmanabad to invite its people to submission and to the Muhammadan faith, to preach to them Islam, to demand the Jizya, or poll-tax, and also to inform them that if they would not submit, they must prepare to fight…
They sent their messengers, and craved for themselves and their families exemption from death and captivity. Muhammad Kasim granted them protection on their faithful promises, but put the soldiers to death, and took all their followers and dependents prisoners. All the captives, up to about thirty years of age, who were able to work, he made slaves, and put a price upon them…
When the plunder and the prisoners of war were brought before Kasim, and enquiries were made about every captive, it was found that Ladi, the wife of Dahir, was in the fort with two daughters of his by his other wives. Veils were put on their faces, and they were delivered to a servant to keep them apart. One-fifth of all the prisoners were chosen and set aside; they were counted as amounting to twenty thousand in number, and the rest were given to the soldiers. Protection was given to the artificers, the merchants, and the common people, and those who had been seized from those classes were all liberated. But he (Kasim) sat on the seat of cruelty, and put all those who had fought to the sword. It is said that about six thousand fighting men were slain, but, according to some, sixteen thousand were killed, and the rest were pardoned.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Source: The Chach Nama, in: Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume I, p. 176-181. ( also quoted in Bostom, A. G. M. D., & Bostom, A. G. (2010). The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Amherst: Prometheus.) note: Quotes from The Chach Nama

Death, Men, War, People

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!”

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

On the numerical value of α, the fine-structure constant, p. 129
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

God, Understanding, Nature, Dance

“Revolutions have nowhere ended, and least of all in ROme, without demanding a certain number of victims, who under forms more or less borrowed from justice atone fro the fault of defeat as though it were a crime.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 3, Pg. 268, Translated by W.P. Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 3

Justice

“When I look at the number of things which a boy must now learn, or is encouraged to learn, and when I look at the questions in the examination papers, I am quite content that I was brought up in other days; and that if I did not learn much and was taught next to nothing, I have kept to old age the sense, whatever it may be, which came with me into the world.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Age, World, Boy, Question

“I am convinced the days of reckless corruption in this country are numbered. Even now, history is drawing a line in the sand and there is a war that rages. Consider whether you will fight on the right side when the rule of integrity is finally realised. Because that day is coming. As much as integrity, impartiality is a good principle to espouse and a difficult practice to achieve. Yet achieve it you must. The purpose of the police is to enforce the law, and the law favours no man. Your decisions as such, must never be subject to the charge of discrimination.”

Uhuru Kenyatta (1961) Kenyan politician

On modernizing police in Kenya, quoted in " President Kenyatta promises modernization of police service https://citizentv.co.ke/news/president-kenyatta-promises-modernization-of-police-service-115214/", CitizenTV (February 19, 2016).

War, Law, History, Decision

“It is true that in recent years a number of attractive histories of mathematics have been published in England and America, but these have only dealt with Greek mathematics as part of the larger subject, and in consequence the writers have been precluded… from presenting the work of the Greeks in suflicient detail. The same remark applies to the German histories of mathematics, even to the great work of Moritz Cantor…”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Preface p. vi
A History of Greek Mathematics (1921) Vol. 1. From Thales to Euclid

History, Mathematics, Parting

“It seems well past time to reconsider our sweeping UPL [Unauthorized Practice of Law] prohibitions. The fact is nonlawyers already perform — and have long performed — many kinds of work traditionally and simultaneously performed by lawyers. Nonlawyers prepare tax returns and give tax advice. They regularly negotiate with and argue cases before the Internal Revenue Service. They prepare patent applications and otherwise advocate on behalf of inventors before the Patent & Trademark Office. And it is entirely unclear why exceptions should exist to help these sort of niche (and some might say, financially capable) populations but not be expanded in ways more consciously aimed at serving larger numbers of lower- and middle-class clients.... Consistent with the law of supply and demand, increasing the supply of legal services can be expected to lower prices, drive efficiency, and improve consumer satisfaction.”

Neil Gorsuch (1967) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

"Access to Affordable Justice: A challenge to the bench, bar, and academy" https://law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/centers/judicialstudies/judicature/judicature_100-3_gorsuch.pdf Judicature ("The Scholarly Journal for Judges"), Autumn 2016, Volume 100, Issue Number 3, page 49.

Law, Way, Time, Past

“Another feature of Alexandrian algebra is the absence of any explicit deductive structure. The various types of numbers… were not defined. Nor was there any axiomatic basis on which a deductive structure could be erected. The work of Heron, Nichomachus, and Diophantus, and of Archimedes as far as his arithmetic is concerned, reads like the procedural texts of the Egyptians and Babylonians… The deductive, orderly proof of Euclid and Apollonius, and of Archimedes' geometry is gone. The problems are inductive in spirit, in that they show methods for concrete problems that presumably apply to general classes whose extent is not specified. In view of the fact that as a consequence of the work of the classical Greeks mathematical results were supposed to be derived deductively from an explicit axiomatic basis, the emergence of an independent arithmetic and algebra with no logical structure of its own raised what became one of the great problems of the history of mathematics. This approach to arithmetic and algebra is the clearest indication of the Egyptian and Babylonian influences… Though the Alexandrian Greek algebraists did not seem to be concerned about this deficiency… it did trouble deeply the European mathematicians.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p.144

History, Mathematics, Problem, Reading

“Alas! alas! too often conscience sleeps,
When pleasure's syren numbers lull its rest.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto II, VIII
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Pleasure, Sleep

“The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior. When our primary focus is on discrete behaviors, we end up ignoring the whole child.”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

"Unconditional Teaching," Educational Leadership

Children, Books, Behavior, Time

“so you think there’s no validity at all in the subjective?
there may be, there may not. in either case, it should not be used as a basis for an objective truth, which is after all what we are seeking. i have no doubt that many of those who claim to have found god have indeed felt something, but i suspect that the “something” they felt was merely a self-induced mystic experience—akin to a drug trip. witness the great numbers of drug users who claim spiritual insights as a result of their experiences. witness also the evangelists and faith-healers who induce hysteria and frenzy into their audiences so that they might feel “the hand of god” upon them. to them, god is little more than a meaningful “high.””

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

Section 15 (p. 75; Dr. Auberson, then HARLIE)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

God, Truth, Faith, Feeling

“It is impossible for the behavior of a single, isolated individual to reach a high degree of rationality. The number of alternatives he must explore is so great, the information he would need to evaluate them so vast that even an approximation to objective rationality is hard to conceive. Individual choice takes place in rationality is hard to conceive… Actual behavior falls short in at least three ways, of objective rationality:”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947

Way, Behavior

“A few first rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half-finished. The latter are no credit to their writers and a waste of time to their readers.”

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916–2001) American mathematician and information theorist

IRE Transactions on Information Theory (1956), volume 2, issue 1, page 3. * The Bandwagon
Shannon
Claude E.
2
1
1956
March
10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.

Time

“Number is therefore the most primitive instrument of bringing an unconscious awareness of order into consciousness; from it you can best tap the unconscious constellation. This probably why it is used in most mantic methods.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Creation Myths (1995) 'Chains' (Genealogies), p. 326 Shambhala ISBN 0-87773-528-X

“Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Life, Way

“There are documents showing close collaboration of the Zionists with the Nazi Germany, and exaggerated numbers relating to the Jewish holocaust were fabricated to solicit sympathy of the world public opinion, lay the ground for the occupation of Palestine and to justify the atrocities of the Zionists. There is even evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to migrate to Palestine as Jews. The purpose was to install in the heart of the Islamic world an anti-Islamic state under the guise of supporting the victims of racism and to create a rift between the East and the West of the Islamic world after 1400 years of unity between those two parts.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

IRNA (April 24, 2001)
2001

World, Support, Heart, Parting

“I wished to find out whether a similar bright line could be seen in the spectrum of sunlight as in the spectrum of lamplight, and I found, with the telescope, instead of this, an almost countless number of strong and feeble vertical lines which, however, were darker than the other parts of the spectrum, some appearing to be almost perfectly black.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

Joseph von Fraunhofer's Gesammelte Schriften (1888) p. 10, as quoted by Florian Cajori, A History of Physics in its Elementary Branches http://books.google.com/books?id=eegKAQAAIAAJ (1917)

Strong, Appearance, Parting

“My friend Sir G. Johnson subsequently became the leader of one of the two opposed methods of dealing with cholera. His was the “ eliminative” view, namely, that there was mischief in the system that Nature strove to eliminate, so he prescribed castor oil to expedite matters; others took the exactly opposite view, consequently there was open war between the two methods. I read somewhere that one of Johnson’s most fiery opponents considered the number of deaths occasioned by his method to amount to eleven thousand. Leaving aside all question of the accuracy of the estimate of this particular treatment, it is easy to see that when a pestilence lies heavily on a nation, the numbers affected are so large that a proper or improper treatment may be capable of saving or of destroying many thousands of lives. By all means, then, let competitive methods be tested at hospitals on a sufficiently large scale to settle their relative merits. Of this I will speak further almost immediately.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. III Medical Studies

Death, War, Question, Nature

“There is no god, or love, just time / Saying "Do what you will. Nothing's real today" / We are fleeting numbers, and images / Like the liquid crystal digital readout / Floating on the sea of grey.”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

Superbia

Love, God, Time, Sea

“I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras… I have no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a University course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as "startling"…. Very recently I came across a tract published by you styled Orders of Infinity in page 36 of which I find a statement that no definite expression has been as yet found for the number of prime numbers less than any given number. I have found an expression which very nearly approximates to the real result, the error being negligible. I would request that you go through the enclosed papers. Being poor, if you are convinced that there is anything of value I would like to have my theorems published. I have not given the actual investigations nor the expressons that I get but I have indicated the lines on which I proceed. Being inexperienced I would very highly value any advice you give me. Requesting to be excused for the trouble I give you. I remain, Dear Sir, Yours truly…”

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) Indian mathematician

Letter to G. H. Hardy, (16 January 1913), published in Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary American Mathematical Society (1995) History of Mathematics, Vol. 9

Education, School, Error, Mathematics

“The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own allegiance. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. It is the wish of the British people and the duty of Her Majesty's Government to do everything that we can to uphold that right. That will be our hope and our endeavour and, I believe, the resolve of every Member of the House.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (3 April 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104910 First term as Prime Minister

Life, People, Peace, Hope

“While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed. It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought. A quick glance at the Equipment section of this booklet will reveal just how little is required. The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his "dungeons" and upper terrain before the affair begins.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

Preface of the Original Dungeons & Dragons, (1 November 1973)

Game, Time, Past, Future

“Let as many Numbers, as you please, be proposed to be Combined: Suppose Five, which we will call a b c d e. Put, in so many Lines, Numbers, in duple proportion, beginning with 1. The Sum (31) is the Number of Sumptions, or Elections; wherein, one or more of them, may several ways be taken. Hence subduct (5) the Number of the Numbers proposed; because each of them may once be taken singly. And the Remainder (26) shews how many ways they may be taken in Combination; (namely, Two or more at once.) And, consequently, how many Products may be had by the Multiplication of any two or more of them so taken. But the same Sum (31) without such Subduction, shews how many Aliquot Parts there are in the greatest of those Products, (that is, in the Number made by the continual Multiplication of all the Numbers proposed,) a b c d e. For every one of those Sumptions, are Aliquot Parts of a b c d e, except the last, (which is the whole,) and instead thereof, 1 is also an Aliquot Part; which makes the number of Aliquot Parts, the same with the Number of Sumptions. Only here is to be understood, (which the Rule should have intimated;) that, all the Numbers proposed, are to be Prime Numbers, and each distinct from the other. For if any of them be Compound Numbers, or any Two of them be the same, the Rule for Aliquot Parts will not hold.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Source: A Discourse of Combinations, Alterations, and Aliquot Parts (1685), Ch.I Of the variety of Elections, or Choice, in taking or leaving One or more, out of a certain Number of things proposed.

Way, Parting

“Descend from the infinite to the infinitesimal. Long before... observation had begun to penetrate the veil under which Nature has hidden her mysteries, the restless mind sought some principle of power strong enough and of sufficient variety to collect and bind together all parts of a world. This seemed to be found, where one might least expect it, in abstract numbers. Everywhere the exactest numerical proportion was seen to constitute the spiritual element of the highest beauty.”

Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880) American mathematician

Ben Yamen's Song of Geometry (1853)

World, Beauty, Nature, Strong

“Mathematicks therefore is a Science which teaches or contemplates whatever is capable of Measure or Number as such. When it relates to Number, it is called Arithmetick; but when to measure, as Length, Breadth, Depth, Degrees of Velocity in Motion, Intenseness or Remissness of Sounds, Augmentation or Diminution of Quality, 6tc. it is called Geometry.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702, p. 1, The Introduction

Science

“A Justice Department survey reports that 70 percent of those arrested for serious crimes are drug uses, which may mean that "drugs cause crime." A more sophisticated analysis suggests that the high cost of drugs, a result of their prohibition, forces drug users to turn crime to support an unnecessarily expensive habit.
Drug prohibition, by giving young people the thrill of breaking the law and giving pushers a strong incentive to find new customers, may actually increase the number of drug users. Moreover, out policy of pressuring friendly governments to wipe out drug cultivation has undermined many of those regimes and provoked resentment against us among their citizens and government officials.
We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war- billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom — is too high.”

David Boaz (1953) libertarian, author and editor

"Let's Quit the Drug War" in The New York Times (17 March 1988) http://www.cato.org/research/articles/boaz-880317.html

War, People, Justice, Law

“The number of different optical phenomena has become in our time so great that caution must be taken so as to avoid being deceived, and also to refer the phenomena to the simple laws.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

In The Wave Theory, Light and Spectra. Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra. Memoirs by Joseph Von Fraunhofer (1981), p. 14 ISBN 0-405-13867-9

Law, Time

“We’re the only ethnic group in America that has been dismembered. We didn't migrate here or immigrate here voluntarily. The United States came to us in succeeding waves of invasions. We are a captive people, in a sense, a hostage people. It is our political destiny and our right to self-determination to want to have our homeland [back]. Whether they like it or not is immaterial. If they call us radicals or subversives or separatists, that’s their problem. This is our home, and this is our homeland, and we are entitled to it. We are the host. Everyone else is a guest.
It is not our fault that whites don’t make babies, and blacks are not growing in sufficient numbers, and there’s no other groups with such a goal to put their homeland back together again. We do. Those numbers will make it possible. I believe that in the next few years, we will see an irredentists movement, beyond assimilation, beyond integration, beyond separatism, to putting Mexico back together as one. That's irridentism. One Mexico, one nation.”

José Ángel Gutiérrez (1944) American academic

interview with In Search of Aztlán on August 8, 1999 http://www.insearchofaztlan.com/gutierrez.html

People, Home, Problem, Sense

“From 280,000-750,000, Armenians initially raised their death count to 800,000 to test the credibility waters. … They are now testing the waters at 2.5-3 million killed as their chances for a congressional genocide resolution recede. It speaks volumes that champions of the inflated death figures have no explanation for why Armenians on the scene would have erred. Think of the absurdity of discarding the current death count of Afghan civilians in the United States-Afghan war in favor of a number deduced in the year 2109!”

Bruce Fein (1947) American lawyer

Lies, Damn Lies, and Armenian Deaths (2009)

Death, War, Thinking, Water

“The very thing that drives you, can drive you insane
Got a head full of thought crimes and a number with no name
Got an eleventh hour Jesus and a mouth full of blame
A casket lined with silver dollars and a number with no name.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Number With No Name.
Song lyrics, White Lies for Dark Times (2009)

“The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Alleged to have been made in a September 13, 2001 press conference. This wording has not been confirmed.
Attributed, Misquotations

“Number is that property of a group of distinct things which remains unchanged during any change to which the 263 group may be subjected which does not destroy the distinctness of the individual things.”

Henry Burchard Fine (1858–1928) American academic

Source: The Number-System of Algebra, (1890), p. 3; Reported in Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book https://archive.org/stream/memorabiliamathe00moriiala#page/81/mode/2up, (1914), p. 263

Change

“Some of God's children, the "holy people", the writer among the number, though not associated with the "Miller movement", nor with the denomination subsequently organized, which calls itself the "Second Advent Church," have been looking at and "earnestly waiting" for Michael's Kingdom; and gladly we bear testimony to the "blessedness" of the wonderfully clear unfoldings of our Father's plan, at and since the fall of 1874 - the end of the 1335 days.
Words fail us to express this blessedness! Only those who have been refreshed in spirit with this new wine of the Kingdom could appreciate it, if we could describe it. It is therefore something to be felt, rather than told. It was at and since the ending of those 1335 prophetic, symbolic days that the previous views of the Lord's presence, and the fact that we are even now living in the time of the "harvest" of this Gospel age, and in the time of the setting up of our Michael's (Christ's) Kingdom, came to be known.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 88.

God, Children, People, Age

“The Weinreichs have laid out, with numerical precision, the outlines of a world, of a fantastic land in which it would behoove you to know how to say, in Yiddish,
250. What is the flight number?
1372. I need something for a tourniquet.
1379. Here is my identification.
254. Can I go by boat/ferry to----?”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

A Yiddish Pale Fire

World

“M, you see, is four, and D is four too, and H is eight, and four and four and eight are sixteen, which is made up of one and six, which make seven—my number.”

Margaret Keane (1927) American artist

Page 48.
1965, Cited by Jane Howard

“Round numbers are always false.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Quoted in the "Apophthegms, Sentiments, Opinions and Occasional Reflections" of Sir John Hawkins (1787-1789) in Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897), vol. II, p. 2, edited by George Birkbeck Hill

Falseness

“My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers — to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response — for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead.”

Daniel Tammet book Born on a Blue Day

Source: Born on a Blue Day (2006), Chapter 6: Adolescence.

History, Study

“Racism should be viewed as an intervening variable. You give me a set of conditions and I can produce racism in any society. You give me a different set of conditions and I can reduce racism. You give me a situation where there are a sufficient number of social resources so people don't have to compete for those resources, and I will show you a society where racism is held in check. If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it.”

William Julius Wilson (1935) American sociologist

Interview with Mother Jones.

People, Thinking, Time

“The weakness of a soul is proportionate to the number of truths that must be kept from it.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 61
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Truth, Soul

“We are being colonised without New Zealanders having some say in the numbers of people coming in and where they are coming from. This is a deliberate policy of ethnic engineering and re-population.”

Winston Peters (1945) New Zealand politician

2005 speech on immigration policy, entitled "Securing Our Borders and Protecting Our Identity."

People

“But the harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies — whose physical fitness is not what it should be — who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation. For the physical vigor of our citizens is one of America's most precious resources. If we waste and neglect this resource, if we allow it to dwindle and grow soft then we will destroy much of our ability to meet the great and vital challenges which confront our people. We will be unable to realize our full potential as a nation.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1960, Sport at the New Frontier: The Soft American

People, Help, Parting

“In the records referring to the rise of Vijayanagara, the Marathas, and the Sikhs, the religious motive is brought into a sharper focus. These records leave us in no doubt that the defence of Hindu Dharma was uppermost in the minds of Madhava Vidyaranya, Samartha Ramdas, and Guru Tegh Bahadur. The purpose for which the sword was unsheathed by Harihar and Bukka, Shivaji and the Sikhs, becomes quite clear in many poems written in praise of these heroes by a number of Hindu poets. The purpose, we are told, was to save the cow, the Brahmin, the šikhã, the sûtra, the honour of Hindu women, and the sanctity of Hindu places of worship.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Women, Motivation

“The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Escape from Freedom" http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/files/willis-tomfrank.pdf, Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)

Secret

“Graduation was nice. General Clark liked it. The Board of Visitors liked it. Moms and Dads liked it. And the Cadets hated it, for without a doubt it ranked as the most boring event of the year. Thus it was in 1964 that the Clarey twins pulled the graduation classic. When Colonel Hoy called the name of the first twin, instead of walking directly to General Clark to receive his diploma, he headed for the line of visiting dignitaries, generals, and members of the Board of Visitors who sat in a solemn semi-circle around the stage. He shook hands with the first startled general, then proceeded to shake hands and exchange pleasantries with every one on the stage. He did this so quickly that it took several moments for the whole act to catch on. When it finally did, the Corps went wild. General Clark, looking like he had just learned the Allies had surrendered to Germany, stood dumbfounded with Clarey number one's diploma hanging loosely from his hand; then Clarey number two started down the line, repeating the virtuoso performance of Clarey number one, as the Corps whooped and shouted their approval. The first Clarey grabbed his diploma from Clark and pumped his hand vigorously up and down. Meanwhile, his brother was breezing through the hand-shaking exercise. As both of them left the stage, they raised their diplomas above their heads and shook them like war tomahawks at the wildly applauding audience. No graduation is remembered so well.”

Pat Conroy book The Boo

Source: The Boo (1970), p. 33

Hate, War, Exercises, Moms

“As early as in the time of Sultan Iltutmish (1210-1236), soon after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, some Ulama suggested to him to confront the Hindus with a choice between Islam and death. The Wazir Nizamul Mulk Junaidi replied: “But at the moment in India… the Muslims are so few that they are like salt (in a large dish). If such orders are to be enforced… the Hindus might combine… and the Muslims would be too few in number to suppress(them). However, after a few years when in the capital and in the regions and small towns, the Muslims are well established and the troops are larger, it will be possible to give Hindus, the choice of ‘death’ or ‘Islam’.”68”

Iltutmish (1210–1236) Sultan of Mamluk Sultanate

Ziyauddin Barani, Sana-i-Muhammadi in Medieval India Quarterly, Aligarh, I, Part III, pp. 100-105. quoted in K.S. Lal, Legacy of Muslim rule in India, 1992.

Death, Time

“Fragments of information, indicative of a widespread poverty, fall under the following heads: Pauperism, the general distress, the number of evictions, the pauper burials; the overcrowding and insanitation due to improper housing; the death rate from tuberculosis; the amount of unemployment; and the number of accidents in certain trades. By means of such data as we have concerning these conditions, a partial, but of course a most imperfect, comparison can be made between the poverty of England and that of the United States.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Poverty (1912), p. 20

Death, Housing

“We shall approach practical objectives through a series of approximations. Keeping the maximization of the rate of return as the central theoretical objective, we shall develop a number of subsidiary objectives (which the economists call proxy variables) which contribute in different ways to improvement in the return and which are also measurable in business practice. A firm which meets high performance in most of its subsidiary objectives will substantially enhance its long-term rate of return. (The defect in our approach is that we cannot prove that the result will be a ‘‘maximum’’ possible overall return.) As will be seen, this road has its own obstacles: the difficulties of long term maximization are replaced by the problem of reconciling claims of conflicting objectives.”

Igor Ansoff (1918–2001) American mathematician

Source: Corporate Strategy, 1965, p. 47; cited in: Graham Kenny, (2012),"From the stakeholder viewpoint: designing measurable objectives", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 33 Iss: 6 pp. 40-46

Way, Business, Problem

“A few moments ago, the body was treated to a report from the senator from Iowa about his recent trip to Cuba. Sounded like he had a wonderful trip visiting, what he described as, a real paradise. He bragged about a number of things that he learned on his trip to Cuba that I'd like to address briefly. He bragged about their health care system, medical school is free, doctors are free, clinics are free, their infant mortality rate may be even lower than ours. I wonder if the senator, however, was informed, number one, that the infant mortality rate of Cuba is completely calculated on figures provided by the Cuban government. And, by the way, totalitarian communist regimes don't have the best history of accurately reporting things. I wonder if he was informed that before Castro, Cuba, by the way, was 13th in the whole world in infant mortality. I wonder if the government officials who hosted him informed him that in Cuba there are instances reported, including by defectors, that if a child only lives a few hours after birth, they're not counted as a person who ever lived and therefore don't count against the mortality rate.”

Marco Rubio (1971) U.S. Senator from state of Florida, United States; politician

Speech to the United States Senate http://friesian.com/antiam.htm (24 February 2014). 2010s, 2014

Health, World, School, Way

“… I believe I have come to adopt a cybernetic way of thinking… I became aware of this in the many conversations with students who were worrying about their future and asked for advice. I heard myself telling them that it was far more important to know what one did not want to do, than to have detailed plans of what one did want to do. One day it dawned on me that this was plain cybernetic advice; It is more useful to specify constraints rather than goals. - And then I explained it by adding that in one’s teens or twenties one usually has already discovered a number of things that one cannot stand, whereas it is quite impossible to foresee what, ten or twenty years later, will provide the satisfactions needed to maintain one’s equilibrium.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Glasersfeld (1992, p. 25) cited in: Stuart Umpleby (2007) "Cybernetics: Definitions and Descriptions". In: A Larry Richards Reader 1997–2007. http://polyproject.wikispaces.com/file/view/Larry+Richards+Reader+6+08.pdf. Larry Richards eds.

Way, Thinking, Future

“Moreover, in order that we may be aroused and exhorted all the more to carry this out, Scripture makes known that there are not one, not two, nor a few foes, but great armies, which wage war against us. For Mary Magdalene is said to have been freed from seven demons by which she was possessed [Mark 16:9; Luke 8:2], and Christ bears witness that usually after a demon has once been cast out, if you make room for him again, he will take with him seven spirits more wicked than he and return to his empty possession [Matt. 12:43-45]. Indeed, a whole legion is said to have assailed one man [Luke 8:30]. We are therefore taught by these examples that we have to wage war against an infinite number of enemies, lest, despising their fewness, we should be too remiss to give battle, or, thinking that we are sometimes afforded some respite, we should yield to idleness.
But the frequent mention of Satan or the devil in the singular denotes the empire of wickness opposed to the Kingdom of Righteousness. For as the church and fellowship of the saints has Christ as Head, so the faction of the impious and impiety itself are depicted for us together with their prince who holds supreme sway over them. For this reason, it was said: "Depart, …you cursed, into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels"”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Matt. 25:41 “Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion” https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1611644453 Book 1, ch.14, sect. 14, edited by John T. McNeill pp.173-174. Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

War, Angels, Thinking, Christ

“You know what is good about these Dixie Chicks burnings or bashings? It's a wonderful, wonderful way for really stupid people to hook up. They meet, they throw some things on the fire, they talk about Vin Diesel, they tell stories about who their favorite Fox anchor is, they exchange phone numbers and in some cases has led to marriages.”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

standup performance, 2003[citation needed]
Standup routines

Marriage, People, Stupidity, Way

“Ahmud Shah, without waiting to besiege the Hindoo capital, overran the open country; and wherever he went put to death men, women, and children, without mercy, contrary to the compact made between his uncle and predecessor, Mahomed Shah, and the Rays of Beejanuggur. Whenever the number of slain amounted to twenty thousand, he halted three days, and made a festival celebration of the bloody event. He broke down, also, the idolatrous temples, and destroyed the colleges of the bramins. During these operations, a body of five thousand Hindoos, urged by desperation at the destruction of their religious buildings, and at the insults offered to their deities, united in taking an oath to sacrifice their lives in an attempt to kill the King, as the author of all their sufferings…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Ahmad Shãh I Walî Bahmanî (AD 1422-1435) Vijayanagar (Karnataka)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Death, Women, Men, Children

“The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

“A Collect of Philosophy”
Opus Posthumous (1955)

Life, God, Way, Idea

“The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, let’s say, or Doc Williams’s Patterson…. The game is definitely an epic … formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.”

Andrei Codrescu (1946) American writer

“A Kind of Love,” The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed (1993).

Game, Thinking, Silence, Grass

“Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain…in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space?”

Italo Svevo book Zeno's Conscience

La vita attuale è inquinata alle radici. L'uomo s'è messo al posto degli alberi e delle bestie ed ha inquinata l'aria, ha impedito il libero spazio. Può avvenire di peggio. Il triste e attivo animale potrebbe scoprire e mettere al proprio servizio delle altre forze. V'è una minaccia di questo genere in aria. Ne seguirà una grande chiarezza... nel numero degli uomini. Ogni metro quadrato sarà occupato da un uomo. Chi ci guarirà dalla mancanza di aria e di spazio?
Source: La coscienza di Zeno (1923), P. 364; p. 436.

Life, Sadness, Tree, Animals

“A spade may be made of any size, and if the same number of strokes be made in the hour, the requisite exertion will vary nearly as the cube of the length of the blade.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter V, Theory of Labour, p. 173.

“Formulating a model of a system should start from the question “Where is the boundary, that encompasses the smallest number of components, within which the dynamic behavior under study is generated?””

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Principles of Systems (1968), p. 4-2; as cited in Richardson (2011)

Behavior, Question, Study

“Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin — nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Let's Be Frank (1957)

“There are incredible number of great Indian artists around like Aditya Kalyanpur, Subhankar Banerjee, Satyajit Talwakar, Amaan and Ayan, among women are Anuradha Pal and others. It is great that such musicians are around. But the media has not adopted to give them the push or put them in open. They deserve to be up there.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I am not torchbearer of Indian classical music: Zakir Hussain

Women

“It’s not just how they feel about it, but what it feels like to wear. It’s not a comfortable process to go through, on a daily basis, and actors will often complain about how I torture them and stuff. I don’t want to torture them - though in some cases I do [laughs] - but I also want to know if they’re just being a baby or if they’re being realistic about it. So I’ll try it on to see which is the most uncomfortable, or what might become annoying after a number of days. So at least I know what it’s like on the other side, so I can sympathise with them, or tell them they’re full of crap, or whatever. Because I’ve worn it, and I know it’s not that bad.”

Rick Baker (1950) American special makeup effects artist

Rick Baker interview: Men In Black 3, werewolves and Videodrome http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/23258/rick-baker-interview-men-in-black-3-werewolves-and-videodrome (November 5, 2012)

Feeling, Baby

“Through three terms in the Lower House and two terms here, Mr. President, he has earned the reputation as a lawmaker with a head for numbers, and an eye for figures – whether tax, budgetary, and perhaps in a previous lifetime, of the female kind.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2013, Speech: Nomination of Senator Ralph Recto as Senate Pro Tempore

Housing

“In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Reported in Proceedings in honor of Mr. Justice Frankfurter and distinguished alumni at the meeting of the Council, Harvard Law School Association in Cambridge, April 30, 1960.
Other writings

Disappointment

“The movie industry is run by accountants in Hollywood and it's as simple as this; everyone has a number on their computer. They can look up Jeremy Irons and see what my last five movies have made. Say you want to make a $20m picture, which is relatively cheap. If Jeremy makes $9m, the director makes $5m, then you need a leading lady, and they just go through those figures - that's how casting happens. And none of my movies has made a lot of money.”

Jeremy Irons (1948) English actor

Lipworth, Elaine, "King of all his castles"

Money

“We saw a countless number of post-chaises full of boys pass by yesterday morning — full of future heroes, legislators, fools, and villains. You have never thanked me for my last letter, which went by the cheese. I cannot bear not to be thanked.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to J. Edward Austen (1816-07-09) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Fools, Boy, Future

“Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1597), XXIX: "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates."

People, Courage, Wolf

“Oh! my name is John Wellington Wells,
I'm a dealer in magic and spells,
In blessings and curses
And ever-filled purses,
In prophecies, witches, and knells.

If you want a proud foe to "make tracks"—
If you'd melt a rich uncle in wax—
You've but to look in
On our resident Djinn,
Number seventy, Simmery Axe!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Mr Wells' song, Act I.
"Simmery Axe" is the traditional pronunciation of "St. Mary Axe", a road in the City of London.
In Gilbert's day, the last building was number 68, though number 70 was built later.
The Sorcerer (1877)

“To a person whose experience has never been brought into relation with the object sulphur, the name signifies nothing; to the scientist… his concept involves the ideas of specific gravity, crystalline form, element, atom, and the like, derived from past experiences. His concept is distinguished from the other by involving… number or quantity.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Idea, Past, Personality

“Is the Home Secretary aware that I was one of those Members there on Saturday and I was able to observe police officers spraying members of the crowd with red paint in order to identify them for later arrest, that the police were using agents provocateurs in the crowd and that at 9.10 during the evening, when there was complete quiet throughout the crowd, a completely unprovoked dragoon-like charge was mounted by the police straight into that crowd, seriously injuring a number of people? Does not the right hon. Gentleman believe that he should go and witness the scale and ferocity of police violence against innocent, peaceful people protesting against the theft of their jobs by the Murdoch empire?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/jan/26/wapping-disturbances in the House of Commons (26 January 1987). 1980s

People, Peace, Home, Painting

“The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

Secret, Universe

“Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours
Should not be numbered by years, daies, and hours.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

Second Week, Fourth Day, Book ii. Compare: " A life spent worthily should be measured by a nobler line,—by deeds, not years", Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro, Act iv, Scene 1.
La Seconde Semaine (1584)

Age

“G. I. Gurdjieff's sexual life was strange in its unpredictability. At certain times he led a strict, almost ascetic life, having no relation with women at all. At other times, his sex life seemed to go wild and it must be said that his unbridled periods were more frequent than the ascetic. At times, he had sexual relationships not only with almost any woman who happened to come within the sphere of his influence, but also with his own pupils. Quite a number of his women pupils bore him children and some of them remained closely connected with him all their lives. Others were just as close to him, as far as one could tell, without a sexual relationship.”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

John G. Bennett Gurdjieff: Making a New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 231-232: Cited in " Sexual Beliefs and Practices http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/sexual.pdf" on gurdjiefffourthway.org, accessed 2013-04-21

Life, Women, Children, Sex

“The state of affairs in other Countries, which claim to be more highly advanced and progressive, is much worse. There it is stated that no man or woman approaches Marriage as a virgin. This is the direct result of provocative publicity. The case of the male is perhaps worse, for he boasts he cannot even recollect the number or wild oats he has sown and which is considered as a Passport to manhood (sic). Others again have disgraced their humanity in disgusting unnatural offences, which they are now trying to make their Governments legalise, and finally others again are subject to the Oedipus complex.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Promiscuity & Continence

Marriage, Country

“The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book II, Chapter III, p. 377.

“The 930,000-odd voters that supported my rival over me and the greater number of voters (than in the 2010 election) who chose not to take part in this (2014) election or were unwilling to come to express support, whatever the reason - as the incumbent mayor, my city government team and everyone else will certainly review (this election) with humility.”

Eric Chu (1961) Taiwanese politician

Eric Chu (2014) cited in " New Taipei's Chu vows to reflect after close call http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201411290052.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 29 November 2014.

Support, Parting

“In modern times sound policy-making must often come to grips with numbers.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Three, Propaganda Technique, p. 118

Time

“There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

from a 1987 class, as quoted in David L. Goodstein, "Richard P. Feynman, Teacher," Physics Today, volume 42, number 2 (February 1989) p. 70-75, at p. 73
Republished in the "Special Preface" to Six Easy Pieces (1995), p. xx.

Star

“I stopped reading the comics page a long time ago. It seems that whoever is in charge of what to put on that page is given an edict that states: “For God’s sake, try to be as bland as possible and by no means offend any one!” Thus, whenever something like Doonesbury would come along, it would be continually censored and, if lucky, eventually banished to the editorial pages. The message was clear: Keep it simple, keep it cute, and don’t be challenging, outrageous or political.
And keep it white!
It’s odd that considering all the black ink that goes into making the comics section (and color on Sundays) that you rarely see any black faces on that page. Well, maybe it’s not so odd after all, considering the makeup of most newsrooms in our country. It is even more stunning when you consider that in many of our large cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago where the white population is barely a third of the overall citizenry, the comics pages seem to be one of the last vestiges of the belief that white faces are just…well, you know…so much more happy and friendly and funny!
Of course, the real funnies are on the front pages of most papers these days. That’s where you can see a lot of black faces. The media loves to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
Oops, there I go playing the race card. You see, in America these days, we aren’t supposed to talk about race. We have been told to pretend that things have gotten better, that the old days of segregation and cross burnings are long gone, and that no one needs to talk about race again because, hey, we fixed that problem.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, the “whites only” signs are down, but they have just been replaced by invisible ones that, if you are black, you see hanging in front of the home loan department of the local bank, across the entrance of the ritzy suburban or on the doors of the U. S. Senate”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

100 percent Caucasian and going strong!
Foreword to "The Boondocks Treasury: a Right to be Hostile" by Aaron McGruder, (2003).
2003

Love, Men, God, Happiness

“I was surprised, while preparing this lecture, to notice how, among my friends who had read the book, a division into two groups appeared. Both groups are equally discerning and educated, and as far as I can tell, equal in numbers. One group is eager to say that they don't understand a word of it, and there are artists and historians among them. Those of the other group claim that they understood it all on first reading, without difficulty. Of course I believe them both, without understanding the combination that separates them so sharply. Perhaps distinctive and contrasting features in the comprehension of works of art are responsible. What I say speaks to some, but not to others. Some are ready, and others are not. But when both someday find that they agree in understanding it, that day may be its last as a book alive in the dissension over its intelligibility.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

George Kubler (1982)"The Shape of Time, Reconsidered," in: Perspecta (Volume 19, MIT Press)

Books, Education, Art, Intelligence

“As in Mathematics in general, the really great advances, embodying new ideas of far-reaching fruitfullness, have been due to an exceedingly small number of great men… there are periods when for a long series of centuries no advance was made; when the results obtained in a more enlightened age have been forgotten. We observe the times of revival, when the older learning has been rediscovered, and when the results of the progress made in distinct countries have been made available as the starting points of new efforts and a fresh period of activity.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), p. 10

Men, Age, Mathematics, Idea

“The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 10
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Feeling, Motivation

“Protocols:
Number 3, para. 5
All people are chained to heavy toil by poverty more firmly than ever they were chained by slavery and serfdom; from these, one way and another, they might free themselves, these could be settled with, but from want they will never get away. We have included in the constitution such rights as to the masses appear fictitious and not actual rights. All these so-called “People’s Rights” can exist only in idea, an idea which can never be realized in practical life. What is it to the proletariat laborer, bowed double over his heavy toil, crushed by his lot in life, if talkers get the right to babble, if journalists get the right to scribble nonsense side by side with good stuff, once the proletariat has no other profit out of the constitution save only those pitiful crumbs which we fling them from out table in return for their voting in favor of what we dictate, in favor of the men we place in power, the servants of our agenteur…. Republican Rights for a poor man are no more than a bitter piece of irony.
Graves: Aha!…A very obvious cop, almost word for word and a careful insertion of modern language such as “People’s Rights” and “Republican Rights.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.77

Life, Men, People, Way

“I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of 'ready-mades' to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my 'ready-mades' against such contamination.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, Apropos of Ready Mades', 1961

Art, Time

“The steps in front must be arranged so that there shall always be an odd number of them; for thus the right foot, with which one mounts the first step, will also be the first to reach the level of the temple itself.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book III, Chapter IV, Sec. 4

“The number of saints, a synod without desire,
From God the divine prophesy.
In every tongue they compose,
About the earth they were,
And so many wisely prophesied
Christ, and before he was, they were.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Elegy of the Thousand Sons

God, Christ

“As Eastern thought has begun to interest a significant number of people, and meditation is no longer viewed with ridicule or suspicion, mysticism is being taken seriously even within the scientific community An increasing number of scientists are aware that mystical thought provides a consistent and relevant philosophical back ground to the theories of Contemporary science, a conception of the world in which the scientific discoveries of men and women can be in perfect harmony with their SpirItual aims and religious beliefs.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Source: The Turning Point (1982), p. 78.

Women, Men, People, World

“One observed a number of discordant features – a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement and then some lack of human substance, some hereditary thinness in the blood that at times gave people who met him an odd feeling in the spine. He seemed almost indecently lacking in ordinariness.”

Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) British writer

Gerald Brenan "Bloomsbury in Spain and England", in S. P. Rosenbaum (ed.) The Bloomsbury Group (1995) p. 347.
Criticism

People, Feeling, Time

“I'm sure a mathematician would claim that 0 and 1 are both very interesting numbers.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199707300650.XAA05515@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,— honour to them; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men, God, People, Truth

“Suppose, deep down, you suspect that you are dull, and your public works are a form of vengeance. You talk a good poem, and think by numbers. Once upon a time, you were interesting; then Mother died and you had to give it up.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Power Party" (p. 62)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Thinking, Time

“The producer orders a certain title.
The musical director orders a certain rhythm.
The dance director orders a certain number of bars.
And the composer orders a certain number… of aspirin.”

Frank Loesser (1910–1969) American songwriter

on working in Hollywood
Reported by musician Michael Feinstein, transcript of * Fresh Air Celebrates Frank Loesser's 100th Birthday
http://www.npr.org/2010/06/29/128169934/fresh-air-celebrates-frank-loesser-s-100th-birthday
Fresh Air
http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/
Host: Terry Gross, Guest: Michael Feinstein
NPR
WHYY
Philadelphia
2009-06-29
2:34
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=128169934

Music, Dance

“An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders.”

Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986) Soviet politician and diplomat

Quote from Ludo Martens's Another view of Stalin, pp. 177. Original quote from the Russian version of F. Chueva Sto sorok besed s MOLOTOVYM (Moscow: Terra, 1991), p. 413 (The quote does not appear in the French translation: Félix Tchouev, Conversations avec Molotov (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995).) The quote can also be found here http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/molotov.html

Thinking

“I see from the number of physicians that you think my condition dangerous, but I thank God, if it is His will, that I am ready to go. … It is the Lord's Day; my wish is fulfilled. … I have always desired to die on Sunday.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Words on his deathbed (9 - 10 May 1863); as quoted in "Stonewall Jackson's Last Days" by Joe D. Haines, Jr. in America's Civil War http://www.historynet.com/magazines/american_civil_war/3031406.html

God, Thinking

“God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.”

Paul Erdős (1913–1996) Hungarian mathematician and freelancer

Referencing Albert Einstein's famous remark that "God does not play dice with the universe", this is attributed to Erdős in "Mathematics : Homage to an Itinerant Master" by D. Mackenzie, in Science 275:759 (1997), but has also been stated to be a comment originating in a talk given by Carl Pomerance on the Erdős-Kac theorem, in San Diego in January 1997, a few months after Erdős's death. Confirmation of this by Pomerance is reported in a statement posted to the School of Engineering, Computer Science & Mathematics, University of Exeter http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin//kac-pomerance.txt, where he states it was a paraphrase of something he imagined Erdős and Mark Kac might have said, and presented in a slide-show, which subsequently became reported in a newspaper as a genuine quote of Erdős the next day. In his slide show he had them both reply to Einstein's assertion: "Maybe so, but something is going on with the primes." Misattributed

God, Universe

“I recognize fully that you do not draw well, my dear Lucien [his son, also painter]. I told you any number of times that it is essential to have known forms in the eye and in the hand. It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter, 1883, to his son Lucien; as quoted by C., & Rewald, in Camille Pissarro: Letters to his son Lucien, New York: Pantheon Books, 1943 p. 32
1880's

Time, Drawing

“The geometric line is an invisible thing. It is the track made by the moving point; that is, its product. It is created by movement – specifically through the destruction of the intense self-contained repose of the point. Here, the leap out of the static to the dynamic occurs. […] The forces coming from without which transform the point into a line, can be very diverse. The variation in lines depends upon the number of these forces and upon their combinations.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

1920 - 1930, Point and line to plane, 1926

Dependency

“Just don't make the '9' format pack/unpack numbers…”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199710091434.HAA00838@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Quotes about number page 10

Quotes about number
page 10