Quotes about number
page 6

“The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers. How will you know if someone really loves you if they only meet your expectations and not your needs?”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Source: Maybe, Maybe Not

Love, Heart

“We did all the standard camp numbers: "Down By The Aegean," "I Am My Own Great-Great-Great-Great Grandpa," "This Land is Minos's Land.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

“I am just two and two. I am hot. I am cold. I'm the parent of numbers that cannot be told. I'm a gift beyond measure, a matter of course, and I'm yielded with pleasure- when taken by force.”

L.J. Smith The Forbidden Game

Source: The Forbidden Game

Pleasure, Parent

“We live in a world which worships the unreal female body and despises real female power. In this culture, where women are commanded to always look available nut never actually be so, where, where we are obliged to appear socially and sexually consumable whilst consuming as little as possible, our most drastic retaliation is to undertake our own consumption: to consume ourselves - and so we do in ever increasing numbers.”

Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Source: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010), Chapter 2

Women, World, Appearance

“A million and a half of people spread over the Atlantic seaboard might be thought no great number; but it was a new thing in the world. …which had in fact been carefully noted by Benjamin Franklin in a pamphlet on The Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.—that within three-quarters of a century the population of the continental colonies had doubled every twenty-five years, whereas the population of Old England during a hundred years past had not doubled once and now stood at only some six and a half millions. …With these facts in mind, one might indeed say that a people with so much vitality and expansive power was abundantly able to pay taxes; but perhaps it was also a fair inference, if any one was disposed to press the matter, that unless it was so minded, such a people was already, or assuredly soon would be, equally able not to pay them.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

People, World, Past, Country

“The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to art itself…it is the same as saying some kind of food is good but most people can't eat it.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

People, Food, Art, Time

“The facts, indeed, connected with this gloomy department of statistics show that the most valuable period of human life—that in which a man is producing more than he is consuming—is that which provides the greatest number of victims.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 18

Life

“Darab Khan who had been sent with a strong force to punish the Rajputs of Khandela and to demolish the great temple of the place, attacked the place on the 8th March/5th Safar, and slew the three hundred and odd men who made a bold defence, not one of them escaping alive. [16 October 1678] The temples of Khandela and Sanula and all other temples in the neighbourhood were demolished…'On Sunday, the 25th May/24th Rabi. S., Khan Jahan Bahadur came from Jodhpur, after demolishing the temples and bringing with himself some cart-loads of idols, and had audience of the Emperor, who highly praised him and ordered that the idols, which were mostly jewelled, gold en, silver y, bronze, copper or stone, should be cast in the yard (jilaukhanah) of the Court and under the steps of the Jam'a mosque, to be trodden on. They remained so for some time and at last their very names were lost' [25 May 1679]…Ruhullah Khan and Ekkataz Khan went to demolish the great temple in front of the Rana's palace, which was one of the rarest buildings of the age and the chief cause of the destruction of life and property of the despised worshippers Twenty machator Rajputs who were sitting in the temple vowed to give up their lives; first one of them came out to fight, killed some and was then himself slain, then came out another and so on, until every one of the twenty perished, after killing a large number of the imperialists including the trusted slave, Ikhlas. The temple was found empty. The hewers broke the images…..”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Maasir-i-alamgiri, translated into English by Sir Jadu-Nath Sarkar, Calcutta, 1947, pp. 107-120, also quoted in part in Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers. Different translation: “Darab Khan was sent with a strong force to punish the Rajputs of Khandela and demolish the great temple of that place.” (M.A. 171.) “He attacked the place on 8th March 1679, and pulled down the temples of Khandela and Sanula and all other temples in the neighbourhood.”(M.A. 173.) Sarkar, Jadunath (1972). History of Aurangzib: Volume III. App. V.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1670s

Life, Men, Age, Strong

“K. Barton Osborn, who served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of forms of torture used by U. S. and Saigon personnel, but also made the startling claim that “I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.””

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. 325-326.

Intelligence

“Indeed, racist views about the demographic 'threat' that the Palestinians constitute for a Jewish supremacist Israel are not confined to Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Jewish right wing (which is anyway a majority in Jewish Israel), but are also voiced by liberal and leftist Israeli Jews. In December 2000, the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzlia Interdisciplinary Center in Israel held its first of a projected series of annual conferences dealing with the strength and security of Israel, especially with regards to maintaining its Jewish supremacist character. One of the 'Main Points' identified in the 52-page conference report is the concern over the numbers needed to maintain the Jewish supremacy of Israel.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

“What has art to do with those things [Revolution, socialism]? Art will never come except from some little disregarded corner where some isolated man is studying the mysteries of nature, fully assured that the answer which he ﬁnds and which is good for him is good also for humanity, whatever may be the number of succeeding generations.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

as quoted by Romain Rolland in his book Millet, c. 1900; transl. Miss Clementina Black; published by Duckworth & Co, Londo / E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1919, p. 8
undated quotes

Art, Nature, Study

“A number of students denounce state intervention and the loss of university autonomy. This student sector reflects its class background while forgetting its revolutionary obligation. This sector has not realized that it has an obligation to workers and peasants. Our workers and peasants died beside the students in order to attain power.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech to University students (1959)

Universe, Loss, Forgetting

“We shall never know of the numbers of "mute and inglorious Miltons" who failed because the place and time were not ready for them…Was not Sullivan a jewel in the wrong setting?”

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) English composer of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Ralph Vaughan Williams National Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) p. 7
Criticism

Time

“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands. As long therefore as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or any thing else. But our citizens will find employment in this line till their numbers, and of course their productions, become too great for the demand both internal and foreign.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Jay (23 August 1785); published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1953), edited by Julian P. Boyd, vol. 8, p. 426
1780s

Wedding, Country

“I have never been a part of the numbers game. We are not racing horses, who should be numbered. Either the work you do is good or bad.”

Madhuri Dixit (1967) Indian actress

Quote, When personality comes first.....

Game, Horse, Parting

“"We've had death threats", Pete says, "saying, 'You're evil and your days are numbered." What was it, "Don't panic but be scared". Someone shat on our doorstep once and nailed a sparrow to our basement door. I don't mind, me. I'll out-weird any stalker.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

On the downside of fame, NME (New Musical Express), March 13, 2004
People

Death, Evil

“I don’t think artists should be sponsored. You should not rely on grants. You either make a success of your art or you don’t. I worked as an artist for a number of years without making much money – I have never had any financial backing in that way. Things are now very good for me but for a lot of the time things were not.”

Peter Blake (1932) British artist

Colin Serjent, "Blake's 08, http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/nerve9/peter_blake.php Nerve, Autumn 2006 Life

Money, Art, Way, Thinking

“To appreciate the nature of fractals, recall Galileo's splendid manifesto that "Philosophy is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which one wanders about in a dark labyrinth." Observe that circles, ellipses, and parabolas are very smooth shapes and that a triangle has a small number of points of irregularity. Galileo was absolutely right to assert that in science those shapes are necessary. But they have turned out not to be sufficient, "merely" because most of the world is of infinitely great roughness and complexity. However, the infinite sea of complexity includes two islands: one of Euclidean simplicity, and also a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present, but is the same at all scales.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

World, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“Nobody who has lived through the rise of the violent anti-Semitism which led to Hitler can refuse Mrs. Thatcher admiration for her courageous and outspoken warning. When I grew up in Vienna the established Jewish families were a generally respected group and all decent people would frown upon the occasional anti-Jewish outbursts of a few popular politicians. It was the sudden influx of large numbers of Galician and Polish Jews [during World War I] … which in a short period changed the attitude. They were too visibly different to be readily absorbed.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Letter to The Times after Thatcher claimed that British people were afraid of being "swamped" by people of a different culture. (11 February 1978), p. 15
1960s–1970s

War, People, World, Family

“Around the country, ideas that originated on the hard right or in the fevered imaginations of conspiracy theorists are finding their way into the mainstream. In a number of cases, these ideas have become commonplace in American minds.”

Chip Berlet (1949) American political analyst

"Into the Mainstream" in Intelligence Report (Summer 2003) at the Southern Poverty Law Center http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=105

Way, Imagination, Idea, Country

“Carl Schmitt in theory is one thing; confined to a few conservatives on the right and a somewhat greater number of envious postmodernists on the left, Schmitt’s ideas have not reached the informed reading public. Schmitt’s books are destined to be confined to the political theory sem inar room for some time to come.”

Alan Wolfe (1942) American political scientist

The Future of Liberalism (2009), Ch. 5 : Mr. Schmitt Goes to Washington

Books, Idea, Time, Reading

“[Islamic terrorism] is different from all other forms of terrorism in at least three important respects. First, it rejects all the contemporary ideologies in their various forms; it sees itself as the total outsider with no option but to take control or to fall, gun in hand. It cannot even enter into talks with other terrorist movements which may, in some specific cases at least, share its tactical objectives. Considering itself as an expression of Islamic revival - which must, by definition, lead to the conquest of the entire globe by the True Faith - it bases all its actions on the dictum that the end justifies the means… The second characteristic that distinguishes the Islamic version from other forms of terrorism is that it is clearly conceived and conducted as a form of Holy War which can only end when total victory has been achieved. The term 'low-intensity warfare' has often been used to describe terrorism, but it applies more specifically to the Islamic kind, which does not seek negotiations, give-and-take, the securing of specific concessions or even the mere seizure of political power within a certain number of countries… The third specific characteristic of Islamic terrorism is that it forms the basis of a whole theory of both individual conduct and of state policy. To kill the enemies of Allah and to offer the infidels the choice between converting to Islam or being put to death is the duty of every individual believer as well as the supreme - if not the sole - task of the Islamic state.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Holy Terror: The inside story of Islamic terrorism (1987)

Death, War, Faith, Victory

“Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.”

Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Page 236
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

Fish, Madness

“Thou, Poetry, in absence wert a chain,
Binding our hearts together: where so well
As in thy numbers, could I pour my soul,
In soothing tenderness? 'twas bliss, to make
Thought visible to those of whom I thought.”

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

The Farewell
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Soul, Heart

“Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace—the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now I had existed from day to day in listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fictions, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words. Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time being to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

trans. Richard Bowring (Penguin Books, 1996)
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Life, Beauty, Way, Home

“There’s always a certain number of suckers and a certain number of men lookin’ for a chance to take them in, and the suckers are sure to be took one way or another. It’s the everlastin’ law of demand and supply. p. 60”

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) New York State Senator

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 14 Tammany the Only Lastin’ Democracy

Men, Law, Way, Chance

“The number one book of the ages was written by a committee, and it was called The Bible.”

Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957) American film producer

To a writer who complained that his work was being changed.
Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed)

Books, Age

“There is a vast amount of energy which disappears inside organisations, or is expended going in directions which don't end up leading anywhere. If all that energy is properly directed, it can add up to a huge amount of power that can be used to produce visible results. That's why I think that over the last three years, as the level of awareness shared by the staff has increased, each individual's understanding has also developed. I believe this has meant that the total amount of energy in the company has increased more than it would have by simply increasing the number of staff. That is to say, the overall potential within the company has become more fully realised.”

Satoru Iwata (1959–2015) Japanese video game programmer and businessman

Iwata's Ask: Special Edition Interview http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wii/special_edition_interview

Understanding, Thinking

“Mr. Peres, you are older than I am. And your voice is genuinely loud. I know that it is because you are, in fact, in a psychology of feeling guilty, thus you better know that I will not sound that loud. And when killing is the case, you know how to kill very well. I know how you killed the children on the beaches, I know how you shot them. Two ex-PMs of your country once told me important things. You have had such prime ministers who said, "When I enter Palestine on a tank, I feel happy — in a different way." You have had PMs who said to me "I feel happy when I am on a tank while entering Palestine." And you give me those numbers. I would release their names, in case some of you might be curious of. I also condemn those who acclaim this cruelty, because I think it is a crime against humanity as well.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

As quoted during a discussion panel at 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in "Turkish PM storms off in Gaza row" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/davos/7859417.stm, BBC (January 29, 2009)

Happiness, Children, Way, Feeling

“We have discussed quantity, order and meaning with regard to their contributions to science in general and to psychology in particular. We extracted each of our categories from a different science, but we claimed that despite their different origins, they are all universally applicable. And as a matter of fact, in our treatment of the issues involved in each of our three categories we have found the same general principle: to integrate quantity and quality, mechanism and vitalism, explanation and comprehension or understanding, we had to abandon the treatment of a number of separate facts for the consideration of a group of facts in their specific form of connection. Only thus could quantity be qualitative, and order and meaning be saved from being either introduced into the system of science as new entities, the privileges of life and mind, or discarded as mere figments.
Do we then claim that all facts are contained in such interconnected groups or units that each quantification is a description of true quality, each complex and sequence of events orderly and meaningful? In short, do we claim that the universe and all events in it form one big gestalt?”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 21-22

Life, Understanding, Universe, Science

“Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Truth, Way, Search, Reality

“Suppose it is desired to test the efficiency of several treatments intended to destroy certain larvae on a field. The experiments are arranged in the usual way. The treatments compared are applied to particular plots with several replications and then the plots (or smaller parts of them) are inspected and all the surviving larvae are counted. Thus the observations represent the numbers of surviving larvae in several equal areas. It happens frequently that, while there is room for doubt as to whether there is any significant difference between the average number of survivors corresponding to particular treatments, there is no doubt whatever that the variablitity of the observations differs from treatment to treatment.”

Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981) Polish statistician

p. 35 of "On a new class of "contagious" distributions, applicable in entomology and bacteriology." http://www.jstor.org/stable/2235986 The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 10, no. 1 (1939): 35–57.

Way, Parting

“…when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries you have… a misplacement of satisfactions. You find your emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money… or in proving to the poor, half-naked people in Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large numbers.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Money, People

“Neil Cavuto: Yeah but, you can't, Congressman, we've got a pretty good economy going here, right? We've got productivity soaring. We've got retail sales that are strong. We've got corporate earnings that for, what, the 19th quarter, are up double digit? We've got a market chasing highs, I mean, this isn't happening in a vacuum, right?
Ron Paul: Yeah, that's nice, but when you have to borrow, you know… My personal finances would be very good if I borrowed a million dollars every month. But, someday, the bills will become due. And the bills will come due in this country, and then we'll have to pay for it. We can't afford this war, and we can't afford the entitlement system.
Neil Cavuto: Look, Congressman, did you say this 10 years ago, when the numbers were similarly strong…
Ron Paul: Go back and check.
Neil Cavuto: …and we were still borrowing a good deal then.
Ron Paul: That's right, that means the dollar bubble is much bigger than ever.
Neil Cavuto: So what's gonna happen?
Ron Paul: We've had the NASDAQ bubble collapse already. We have the housing bubble in the middle of a collapse, so the dollar bubble will collapse as well. We have to live within our means. You can't print money out of the blue, and think you can print your money into prosperity.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Your World with Neil Cavuto, FOX News, May 15, 2007 http://www.newshounds.us/2007/05/16/rep_ron_paul_tells_fox_newsrepublicans_the_truth_they_dont_like_hearing_it.php http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU2RK0TNbXk 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, War, Thinking, Strong

“A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women's revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies. We don't know how this will take place exactly, nor the resultant nature of the new social forms, we know that it will take place, and in fact that the process of its development is now irreversibly underway. Of supreme importance in this process is the recovery by modern woman of her mythology as models for theory, consciousness, and action…. The Swiss patrician Jacob Bachofen was one of the first to discover "the female era at the lower seam of history, with its sacerdotal, political, and economic female dominion."”

Jill Johnston book Lesbian Nation

…. The fruits of this research were until recently unavailable except to a few initiates and they now form a cornerstone of the second wave in the feminist revolution....
Lesbian Nation (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1973 (SBN (not ISBN) 671-21433-0)), pp. 248–249.

Women, History, Nature, Sense

“What surprised me, which Google was part of, is that superficial search techniques over large bodies of stuff could get you what you wanted. I grew up in the AI tradition, where you have a complete conceptual model, and the information retrieval tradition, where you have complex vectors of key terms and Boolean queries. The idea that you can index billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want is quite a trick. To put it in more abstract terms, it's the power of using simple techniques over very large numbers versus doing carefully constructed systematic analysis.”

Terry Winograd (1946) American computer scientist

"Talking with Terry Winograd" http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/t_winograd_1.html, Ubiquity 3 (23), 29 July 2002.

Search, Idea, Parting

“Our military force at this moment is as efficient in discipline as it is in numbers; and this not only in the regular army, but in the militia, volunteers, and other descriptions of force. We have six hundred thousand men in arms, besides a navy of two hundred thousand. The masculine energies of the nation were never more conspicuous, and the country never at any period of its history stood in so proud and glorious a position, as at present. After a conflict for fifteen years, against an enemy whose power had been progressively increasing, we are still able to maintain the war with augmenting force and a population, by the pressure of external circumstances, consolidated into an impregnable military mass. Our physical strength has risen when it has been called for; and if we do not present the opposition of numerous fortresses to an invader as the continent does, we present the more insuperable barrier of a high-spirited, patriotic, and enthusiastic people.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (26 February 1810), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), pp. 3-4.
1810s

Men, War, People, History

“If the right hon. Baronet [Peel] chooses to retire from office in consequence of this vote, he carries with him the esteem and gratitude of a larger number of the population of this Empire than ever followed any Minister that was ever hurled from power…I am not misinterpreting the opinion of the people, not only of the electors, but especially of the working classes, when I tender the right hon. Baronet, in my own name, as I might do in theirs, my heartfelt thanks for the unwearied perseverance, the unswerving firmness, and the great ability with which he has during the last six months conducted one of the most magnificent reforms ever carried in any country, through this House of Commons.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1846/jun/25/protection-of-life-ireland-bill in the House of Commons (25 June 1846). 1840s

People, Housing, Perseverance, Country

“All big cities are the same now. It used to be easier at weekends. Not anymore, you get the white stretch limos everywhere. You see them at first, you think, "Is it a celebrity or a foreign dignitary?" No, its some slags. No one's sure how many slags, cause the windows are tinted. All you can say with any real degree of accuracy is that there is an indescriminate number of slags in said vehicle. There's at least two poking out the sunroof.”

Marcus Brigstocke (1973) comedian

Live At The Apollo (2006)

Thinking

“If a number of political societies enter into a larger political society, the laws which the latter may enact, pursuant to the powers intrusted to it by its constitution, must necessarily be supreme over those societies and the individuals of whom they are composed…. But it will not follow from this doctrine that acts of the larger society which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers, but which are invasions of the residuary authorities of the smaller societies, will become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 33
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Law

“Why not go live on the beach?"
"These things are a way of keeping score. I'm sure you have your own way of keeping score."
I nodded. "I compare the numbers of answers I get to the number of questions I ask."
"And how are you doing with that?”

Lee Child book Gone Tomorrow

"Lifetime average is close to a hundred per cent."

Ch. 65.
Gone Tomorrow (2009)

Way, Question

“In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 12 (p. 113)

Nature, Time

“Why is space-time doomed? There are many reasons, among which: In string theory we can change the dimension of space-time by changing the strength of the string force. Thus, the so-called II-A string theory, which semi-classically describes closed strings moving in ten-dimensional flat space for very weak coupling is dual for strong coupling to a theory, called M-theory, that at low energies is described by eleven-dimensional supergravity. By increasing the string coupling we can grow an extra dimension. How can the spatial continuum be fundamental if the number of spatial dimensions can be so changed?”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"Einstein and the Search for Unification", p. 11 https://books.google.com/books?id=rEaUIxukvy4C&pg=PA11, in The legacy of Albert Einstein: a collection of essays in celebration of the year of physics (2007)

Strong, Change, Time

“A number of people including William Wilberforce, sought to refute these arguments by painting in black colors the horrible customs of the Hindus such as sati, infanticide, throwing the children into the Ganga, religious suicides, and above all idolatry. Vivid descriptions were given of the massacre of the innocent resulting from the car procession of Lord Jagannath at Puri, and the Baptists put down the number of annual victims at not less than 120,000. When challenged they had to admit that they did not actually count the dead bodies but arrived at the figure by an ingenious calculation.”

R. C. Majumdar (1888–1980) Indian historian

R. C. Majumdar, The History and Culture of Indian People. Vol. X, 2nd ed., Bombay, 1981, p. 152-153.

Children, People, Cars, Color

“Some Confederate soldiers switched sides, beginning as early as 1862. When Sherman made his famous march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah, his army actually grew in number, because thousands of white southerners volunteered along the way. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of the Confederate army disappeared through desertion. Eighteen thousand slaves joined Sherman, so many that the army had to turn some away. Compare these facts with the portrait common in our textbooks of Sherman's marauders looting their way through a united south. The increasing ideological confusion in the Confederate states, coupled with the increasing strength of the United States, helps explains the Union victory… Many nations and people have continued to fight with far inferior means and weapons… The Confederacy's ideological contradictions were its gravest liabilities, ultimately causing its defeat.”

James W. Loewen book Lies My Teacher Told Me

As quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong https://books.google.com/books?id=5m23RrMeLt4C&pg=PT225&dq=%22Twenty+Nigger+Law%22+loewen&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitwZHxq7fKAhXFdR4KHVgMDrYQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=%22Twenty%20Nigger%20Law%22%20loewen&f=false (2007), New York: New Press, pp. 225&ndash;226 2000s, 2007, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (2007)

People, Way, Victory, Help

“Good Reader, I suspect I may have written some Things twice; if not the same in Words, yet in Sense, which I desire you to pass by favourably; forasmuch as you may well think, it was as difficult and dull a Thing for me, in so great a Number of independent Sentences, to find out the Repetitions, as it would be in a vast Heap of different Coins and Medals, confusedly thrown together, to pick out here and there one that bore the same and like Inscription, with some other among them. Besides the Pains, such a Search would cost me more Time, than I can afford it; for my Glass of Life running now low, I must not suffer one Sand to fall in waste, nor spend one Minute in picking of Straws. And moreover, my aged Eyes being grown weak and dim, I fear they will become quite dark, by much perusing and poring; or at least so far, so as to render me unable to perfect several Papers now lying by me, which I would willingly make a Present of to you.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Excerpt from Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II, To the Reader (Prefatory Remarks).
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Life, Pain, Age, Fear

“But with the passing of the day of lands so cheap as to be well-nigh free, we are coming to confront a new set of conditions. It has been found necessary to inquire whether under these new conditions we can be sure of finding employment for the diverse elements and enormous numbers of new immigrants that are offered to us. We are all agreed, whether we be Americans of the first or of the seventh generation on this soil, that it is not desirable to receive more immigrants than can reasonably be assured of bettering their condition by coming here. For the sake both of those who would come and more especially of those already here, it has been thought wise to avoid the danger of increasing our numbers too fast. It is not a reflection on any race or creed. We might not be able to support them if their numbers were too great. In such event, the first sufferers would be the most recent immigrants, unaccustomed to our life and language and industrial methods. We want to keep wages and living conditions good for everyone who is now here or who may come here.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Genius of America (1924)

Life, Support, Suffering

“The Capitalist system with its exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money he possesses, instead of by their internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a word by German Socialism.”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

Tradition & Revolution: Collected Writings of Troy Southgate, editors: Patrick Boch, Jacob Christiansen and John B. Morgan, UK, Arktos Media (2010) p. 66.

Money, Way

“The habit of ubiquitous interventionism, combining pinprick strikes by precision weapons with pious invocations of high principle, would lead us into endless difficulties. Interventions must be limited in number and overwhelming in their impact.”

Margaret Thatcher book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World

Source: Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, p. 37

“The worker is no longer the slave to his reproductive urge. He is a free bargaining agent who enters the market to dispose of the one commodity he commands — labor power — and if he gets a rise in wages he will not be so foolish as to squander it in a self-defeating proliferation of his numbers.
The capitalist faces him in the arena. His greed and lust for wealth are caustically described in those chapters that leave the abstract world for a look into 1860 England. But it is worth noting that he is not money hungry from mere motives of rapacity; he is an owner-entrepreneur engaged in an endless race against his fellow owner-entrepreneurs; he must strive for accumulation, for in the competitive environment in which he operates, one accumulates or one gets accumulated.
The stage is set and the characters take their places. But now the first difficulty appears. How, asks Marx, can profits exist in such a situation? If everything sells for its exact value, then who gets an unearned increment?”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VI, Karl Marx, p. 148

Money, World, Motivation, Appearance

“Had the acute-angled rabble been all, without exception, absolutely destitute of hope and of ambition, they might have found leaders in some of their many seditious outbreaks, so able as to render their superior numbers and strength too much even for the wisdom of the Circles. But a wise ordinance of Nature has decreed that, in proportion as the working-classes increase in intelligence, knowledge, and all virtue, in that same proportion their acute angle (which makes them physically terrible) shall increase also and approximate to the comparatively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle. Thus, in the most brutal and formidable of the soldier class — creatures almost on a level with women in their lack of intelligence — it is found that, as they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage, so do they wane in the power of penetration itself.

How admirable is this Law of Compensation! And how perfect a proof of the natural fitness and, I may almost say, the divine origin of the aristocratic constitution of the States in Flatland! By a judicious use of this Law of Nature, the Polygons and Circles are almost always able to stifle sedition in its very cradle, taking advantage of the irrepressible and boundless hopefulness of the human mind. Art also comes to the aid of Law and Order. It is generally found possible — by a little artificial compression or expansion on the part of the State physicians — to make some of the more intelligent leaders of a rebellion perfectly Regular, and to admit them at once into the privileged classes; a much larger number, who are still below the standard, allured by the prospect of being ultimately ennobled, are induced to enter the State Hospitals, where they are kept in honourable confinement for life; one or two alone of the more obstinate, foolish, and hopelessly irregular are led to execution.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 3. Concerning the Inhabitants of Flatland

Life, Wisdom, Women, Law

“A study of business education in the United States was recently conducted by Professors Robert A. Gordon of the University of California (Berkeley) and John E. Howell of Stanford University. Their book, Higher Education for Business, has been published by Columbia University Press. Among their major recommendations are:
1 - An increase in the general-education content of undergraduate business education to more than 50 per cent…
2 - Elimination of "fields of concentration" in undergraduate business schools and "drastic streamlining of the number of required courses."”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

"Business itself is enough specialized," Professors Gordon and Howell wrote...
Robert A. Gordon and James E. Howell. "Higher education for business." The Journal of Business Education 35.3 (1959): 115-117.

Books, Education, School, Business

“But in the judgments they exercise they are most accurate and just, nor do they pass sentence by the votes of a court that is fewer than a hundred. And as to what is once determined by that number, it is unalterable. What they most of all honor, after God himself, is the name of their legislator [Moses], whom if any one blaspheme he is punished capitally. They also think it a good thing to obey their elders, and the major part. Accordingly, if ten of them be sitting together, no one of them will speak while the other nine are against it. They also avoid spitting in the midst of them, or on the right side. Moreover, they are stricter than any other of the Jews in resting from their labors on the seventh day; for they not only get their food ready the day before, that they may not be obliged to kindle a fire on that day, but they will not remove any vessel out of its place, nor go to stool thereon. Nay, on other days they dig a small pit, a foot deep, with a paddle (which kind of hatchet is given them when they are first admitted among them); and covering themselves round with their garment, that they may not affront the Divine rays of light, they ease themselves into that pit, after which they put the earth that was dug out again into the pit; and even this they do only in the more lonely places, which they choose out for this purpose; and although this easement of the body be natural, yet it is a rule with them to wash themselves after it, as if it were a defilement to them.”

Josephus on the Essenes

Jewish War

God, Food, Exercises, Nature

“This is a tragedy among human history, the result of large numbers of human errors. But the net of justice is omipresent, it never missed.”

Tan Zuoren (1954) Chinese activist

譚作人：四川大地震人禍更勝於天災 http://www.dajiyuan.com/b5/8/5/22/n2126567.htm

Justice, Error, History

“Just a nobody girlWith a radar to the scene.When the emptiness finds youYou find all the numbers you need.You say you follow your heartWell, honey, you're just being lost.You could you follow your gutBut how much would it cost?”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

Nobody Girl
29 (2005)

“Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)

Art, Sense, Dependency

“It this terrible simplification that there is one Africa, and things go on in one way in Africa. We have to stop that, it is not respectful, and it's not very clever to think that way. I had the fortune to live and work for a time in the United States. I found out that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were different. And so it is in Africa, it's a lot of difference.What do we think it would be concurrency? And what is concurrency? In Sweden, we have no concurrency. We have serial monogamy. Vodka New Year's Eve, new partner for the spring, vodka Midsummer Eve, new partner for the fall, vodka, and it goes on like this, you know, and you collect a big number of ex's, and we've got a terrible chlamydia epidemic.”

Hans Rosling (1948–2017) Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker

On the HIV epidemic http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_the_truth_about_hiv.html

Way, Spring, Thinking, Time

“In a mathematical sense, space is manifoldness, or combination of numbers. Physical space is known as the 3-dimension system. There is the 4-dimension system, there is the 10-dimension system.”

Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865–1923) Mathematician and electrical engineer

New York Times interview (1911)

Mathematics, Sense

“There are many reasons why the religion of Islam impoverishes western society, but the main one, in my opinion, is that it degrades and debases women, except, of course, for left-wing women, who happily degrade and debase themselves defending Islam, like turkeys defending Christmas. A woman in Islam needs to be covered from head to toe because men are not expected to exhibit any kind of basic self-control. I get a lot of correspondence from angry Muslim males and I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that western women are asking to be raped because of the way they dress. No other religion teaches people to think like this. Recently here in Britain, we've had a rash of Muslim gangs pimping and raping young girls in northern England. I do mean Muslim gangs, and not Asians, as the media keep reporting. There are no Sikhs or Hindus involved in this, and to call them Asians to avoid naming the real problem is a slander on Hindus and Sikhs. These men do it because they regard non-Muslim women as subhuman trash. And this poison is coming directly from their religion, a religion whose values are dictated and imposed by some of the most narrow-minded, psychotic human beings on this planet. And, coming as I do from an Irish Catholic background, believe me, that's saying something.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Name the poison" (22 June 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=sEsWO4xep44 2011

Women, Men, People, Religion

“Small properties, much divided, prove the greatest source of misery that can possibly be conceived, and has operated to such a degree and extent in France, that a law ought certainly to be made to render all division below a certain number of arpens illegal.”

Arthur Young (1741–1820) English writer

Arthur Young (1789), quoted in: Samuel Laing (1842), Notes of a Traveller on the Social and Political State of France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy and Other Parts of Europe During the Present Century, p. 35
According to Samuel Laing, Arthur Young wrote this "consequently before the sale of the national domains, crown and church estates, and confiscated estates of the noblesse, and before the law of partition of property among all the children became obligatory on all classes of the community... and a few mouths only before a law was passed directly opposed to the principle he recommends — the law abolishing the rights of primogeniture, and making the division of property among all the children obligatory; and which law has been ever since, that is, for nearly half a century, in general and uninterrupted operation."

Law

“The minority nationalities in our country number more than thirty million. Although they constitute only 6 per cent of the total population, they inhabit extensive regions which comprise 50 to 60 per cent of China's total area. It is thus imperative to foster good relation between the Han people and the minority nationalities. The key to this question lies in overcoming Han chauvinism. At the same time, efforts should also be made to overcome local-nationality chauvinism, wherever it exists among the minority nationalities. Both Han chauvinism and local-nationality chauvinism are harmful to the unity of the nationalities; they represent one kind of contradiction among the people which should be resolved.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

" VI. THE QUESTION OF THE MINORITY NATIONALITIES "
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
Original: (zh-CN) 我国少数民族有三千多万人，虽然只占全国总人口的百分之六，但是居住地区广大，约占全国总面积的百分之五十至六十。所以汉族和少数民族的关系一定要搞好。这个问题的关键是克服大汉族主义。在存在有地方民族主义的少数民族中间，则应当同时克服地方民族主义。无论是大汉族主义或者地方民族主义，都不利于各族人民的团结，这是应当克服的一种人民内部的矛盾。

People, Question, Effort, Time

“The brain's synapses are programmed to grow for a number of years, making new connections. After that time, there is a shift toward pruning, to get rid of unneeded connections. …Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself. …the amount of reorganization that can occur in most adults is vastly less than can occur in children and adolescents.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Children, Time

“Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Democracy" (1861)

Freedom

“Communists, when in control of a nation, have murdered more than 3.6 times the number of people killed in combat in all wars, including the two world wars.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 99

War, People, World, Time

“I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and that you couldn't replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do things that no number of average people could do.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in Steve Jobs at 44, Time (Michael Krantz and Steve Jobs, Oct. 10, 1999) http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,32207,00.html 1990s

People

“There is a simple rule for composite objects, such as nuclei or atoms. The rule is that if such an object contains an odd number of fermions, the composite object is a fermion. Otherwise, it is a boson. …this simple rule doesn't care at all about the number of bosons in the composite object.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“My cell phone number," she says with a wry expression. "I'm staying at my friend's place for a while buy if you ever feel like sseeing somebody, give me a call. We can go out for a bite or whatever. Don't be a stranger, okay? 'Even chance meetings'… how does the rest of that go?”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

"'Are the results of karma.'"
Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Feeling, Chance

“One doesn't enter groups of people simply because one wants or needs to. One has an infinite number of opportunities that occur for no particular reason. Sometimes you feel a sudden unexpected pleasure at being where you find yourself.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Encountering Directors interview (1969)

People, Pleasure, Feeling

“[W]hen a body has experienced any changes, and when after a certain number of transformations it returns to precisely its original state, that is, to that state considered in respect to density, to temperature, to mode of aggregation—let us suppose, I say, that this body is found to contain the same quantity of heat that it contained at first, or else that the quantities of heat absorbed or set free in these different transformations are exactly compensated. This fact has never been called in question. It was first admitted without reflection, and verified afterwards in many cases by experiments with the calorimeter. To deny it would be to overthrow the whole theory of heat to which it serves as a basis. For the rest, we may say in passing, the main principles on which the theory of heat rests require the most careful examination. Many experimental facts appear almost inexplicable in the present state of this theory.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

Question, Appearance, Change

“Judged by the only standards which are admissible in a pure doctrine of numbers i is imaginary in the same sense as the negative, the fraction, and the irrational, but in no other sense; all are alike mere symbols devised for the sake of representing the results of operations even when these results are not numbers (positive integers).”

Henry Burchard Fine (1858–1928) American academic

Source: The Number-System of Algebra, (1890), p. 86; Reported in Moritz (1914, 282)

Sense

“I would just like to challenge the idea that it is necessary to have a lot of women, or a particular number, on a board. Business is very, very competitive and you should take the performance of women in another competitive area, which is sport where [men] have no strength advantage. Chess, bridge, poker - women come absolutely nowhere. I think that just has to be borne in mind.”

Stuart Wheeler (1935) British businessman and politician

As quoted in The Independent, Thursday 15 August 2013 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ukip-faces-renewed-accusations-of-sexism-as-stuart-wheeler-claims-women-are-not-as-competitive-as-men-8763570.html See Victoria Coren for a reply.

Women, Men, Idea, Business

“The tendency was to sell families as units, if for no other reason [than] to keep the slaves contented. The gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains. At the other extreme, when the Central of Georgia railroad company in 1858 equipped a Negro sleeping car to assist in the slave trade it set a standard not always maintained in a later generation. When on the block, the slave was as likely to hinder as to help in his sale. Some, out of a vain conceit in bringing a high price, would boast of their physical prowess, in which case an unwary purchaser would likely be cheated. Others would malinger, because of a grudge against owners or traders or in order to bring a low price and be put at less tiring labor. Dealers, also, adopted the tricks of horse traders to make their merchants more attractive -- the greasiest Negro was generally considered the healthiest.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The Making of America (1986)

Family, Cars, Sleep, Help

“John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) was undoubtedly the most important of the "Western" scientists who, during the twentieth century, accepted the Marxist view of social development. He did more than "accept" it: he tried to sketch the whole history of science from a Marxist viewpoint; he wrote a number of articles explicitly expounding his view of the relation of Marxism to science; and from his student days he played an active role in Communist politics. He has been criticised: during his lifetime, for too readily accepting official Soviet policy, whether relating to society or to science; since his death, for having been too ready to hope that his vision of the use of science for human ends could be implemented by capitalist societies; and at all times, for an allegedly simplistic faith in science as the salvation of mankind.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Brian Vickery (2006) " J.D.Bernal: science and social development http://web.archive.org/web/20100202233156/http://www.lucis.me.uk/bernal.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2006.

Death, Faith, Hope, History

“[T]he lectures… may be expected to remain tolerably commensurate to the state of the sciences for a much longer period; since, in investigations so intimately connected with mathematical principles, the essential improvements will always bear a very small proportion to the number of innovations. …the references, which it contains, are… sufficient to lead those, who may consult the passages quoted, to the works of every author of eminence that has treated of the respective subjects.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Quotes, Mathematics, Science

“That's a hard answer to accept, especially for those American policy intellectuals who recoil from the dreary task of reducing deficits and raising the national savings rate. But economics is not a dismal science because the economists like it that way; it is because in the end we must submit to the tyranny not just of the numbers, but of the logic they express.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Pop Internationalism (1996), Asia's Miracle (1994)

Way, Science

“The pragmatist regards any theory as a mere mathematical machine for generating numbers which he then compares with experiment. A pragmatist is concerned with results, not reality. The pragmatist refuses on principle to speculate about deep reality, such a concept being meaningless from his point of view. Pragmatism is an intelectually safe but ultimately sterile philosophy.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 9, Four Quantum Realities, p. 159

Mathematics, Reality

“Man's excellence lies in his readiness to let others live and lay down his own life. As he progresses, his food also changes for the better. He has the capacity to grow still further. There have been many more discoveries after Darwin's. The book which you have been reading seems to be an old one. Whether it is old or new, the "Principle of the greatest good of the greatest number," or "survival of the fittest" is false.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

In his Letter to Premabehn Kantak, in Collected Works, , Delhi. Ministry of Information (1969-94)., 50:309-10
1930s

Life, Books, Food, Change

“The state, [Kierkegaard] argues, bears a direct relation to numbers. When a state decays, numbers decline and the state disappears. The whole concept is void. The relation of Christianity to numbers is different. A single Christian gives it reality. Christianity bears indeed an inverse relation to numbers. When all become Christians, the concept of Christianity is void. The concept is indeed a polemical one. One can be a Christian only in opposition. When opposition is suppressed, there is no more sense in saying “Christian.” Christendom has astutely abolished Christianity by making us all Christians. … In Christendom there is not the slightest idea of what Christianity is. People cannot see or understand that Christianity has been abolished by its propagation. Again, history probably does not offer any other example of a religion being abolished by reason of its success.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), pp. 35-36

People, Religion, History, Idea

“The reason why the foreign producer gets his produce to market cheaper, relatively, is this — that foreign produce is collected and brought in such large quantities and is sent in great masses to the market. That is the secret of cheap carriage… We must try to make our pounds of produce into tons — or must bring together a number of producers. If you small agriculturists can collectively offer a great bulk of merchandise to the railway companies, they will give you good terms.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Hawarden (5 January 1884), quoted in Gladstone as Financier and Economist (1931) by F. W. Hirst, p. 258
1880s

Secret

“Gravitational force is simple, and a thing by itself, as also are electric and magnetic forces as long as the electric and magnetic poles stand at rest. But as soon as motion comes into the picture, the whole situation is changed. Forces of new kinds come into play, for moving electric charges exert magnetic forces in addition to the electric forces they exert when at rest, while moving magnets exert electric forces in addition to the magnetic forces they exert while at rest. When the exact laws governing these intricate laws had been discovered by a great number of experimenters, Clerk Maxwell succeeded in expressing them in a mathematical form which was both simple and elegant.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law, Mathematics, Change

“Many natural patterns, such as the arrangement of buds on a stem, accord with the series of Fibonacci numbers, and Fibonacci spirals are also observed in spiral nebulae. There are, moreover, no flying pigs …”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Review of 'What Darwin Got Wrong' by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli Palmarini (2010) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/06/what-darwin-got-wrong.

Nature, Flying

“. Here [ Guernsey ] people bath among the rocks which serve as cabins, since there's nothing else; nothing is more attractive than this mixture of women and men crowded on these rocks. One would belief oneself in a landscape by Watteau rather than in the real world. So I'll have a source of real and graceful motives which I will be able to make use of. Some enchanting bathing-costumes... Nothing is more amusing when one is strolling through these rocks, than to surprise young girls getting ready to bathe... Despite the small number of things that I'll be able to bring back [to Paris], I hope to be able to give you an idea of these charming things.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

In Renoir's letter to Paul Durand-Ruel, from Guernsey, 27 Sept, 1883; as cited in 'Renoir in Guernsey' (in 1883), text by John House http://museums.gov.gg/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=81297&p=0, Guernsey museum 1880's

Women, Men, People, World

“[David Sylvester asked Gottlieb, he is aware of the impact of the city New York on his painting:] Definitely I am. When I was in Paris last spring, my original plan was to go for four months and to paint there, and a number of people urged me to stay. That wanted to see what would happen, how my painting would change. But I felt strongly after being there less than a month that it was necessary for me to come back to New York, because I feel a certain rhythm in New York I don't feel in Paris.... there is a tempo in the life of New York which is exhilarating and I feel that this gets into one's painting. It's the pulse, not the look. I'am not involved with the external appearance of the city; it’s the vibrations. ]”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

In an interview (March 1960) with David Sylvester, edited for broadcasting by the BBC first published in ‘Living Arts, June 1963; as quoted in Interviews with American Artists, by David Sylvester; Chatto & Windus, London 2001, p. 33
1960s

Life, People, Feeling, Spring

“It’s simply to say that managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers is the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1982 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1982.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Understanding, Business

“Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian. — Number VIII”

Denis Diderot book Addition aux Pensées philosophiques

Addition aux Pensées philosophiques (1770)

Way, Light, Appearance, Night

““…Mas‘ud hunted through the country around Bahraich, and whenever he passed by the idol temple of Suraj-kund, he was wont to say that he wanted that piece of ground for a dwelling-place. This Suraj-kund was a sacred shrine of all the unbelievers of India. They had carved an image of the sun in stone on the banks of the tank there. This image they called Balarukh, and through its fame Bahraich had attained its flourishing condition. When there was an eclipse of the sun, the unbelievers would come from east and west to worship it, and every Sunday the heathen of Bahraich and its environs, male and female, used to assemble in thousands to rub their heads under that stone, and do it reverence as an object of peculiar sanctity. Mas‘ud was distressed at this idolatry, and often said that, with God’s will and assistance, he would destroy that mine of unbelief, and set up a chamber for the worship of the Nourisher of the Universe in its place, rooting out unbelief from those parts…
“Meanwhile, the Rai Sahar Deo and Har Deo, with several other chiefs, who had kept their troops in reserve, seeing that the army of Islam was reduced to nothing, unitedly attacked the body-guard of the Prince. The few forces that remained to that loved one of the Lord of the Universe were ranged round him in the garden. The unbelievers, surrounding them in dense numbers, showered arrows upon them. It was then, on Sunday, the 14th of the month Rajab, in the aforesaid year 424 (14th June, 1033) as the time of evening prayer came on, that a chance arrow pierced the main artery in the arm of the Prince of the Faithful…”

Ghazi Saiyyad Salar Masud (1014) semi-legendary Muslim figure from India

Awadh (Uttar Pradesh), Mir‘at-i-Mas‘udi in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own historians, Vol. II. p. 524-547

Love, God, Faith, Universe

“THEY who are acquainted with the present state of the theory of Symbolical Algebra, are aware, that the validity of the processes of analysis does not depend upon the interpretation of the symbols which are employed, but solely upon the laws of their combination. Every system of interpretation which does not affect the truth of the relations supposed, is equally admissible, and it is thus that the same process may, under one scheme of interpretation, represent the solution of a question on the properties of numbers, under another, that of a geometrical problem, and under a third, that of a problem of dynamics or optics. This principle is indeed of fundamental importance; and it may with safety be affirmed, that the recent advances of pure analysis have been much assisted by the influence which it has exerted in directing the current of investigation.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1840s, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, 1847, p. ii: Lead paragraph of the Introduction

Truth, Law, Question, Problem

“No man is an island — although one’s known a surprising number who own one.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

Some Hope, Chapter 9

“It stems from the loss of the election and the growth of the 'cowboys'. The Labour Party has got out of the way of losing elections. We are now the natural party of government… These cowboys are absolute Trots. The number of Communists in the party is very small but the Trots are much more sinister. They are negative and have no policy. There is a fairly high number of— not intellectuals but let's say intelligentsia element there, stemming not least from the growth of sociology as a discipline in the universities.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Interview with The Times (7 April 1981), p. 12.

Way, Nature, Universe, Loss

“You ask if I mean to publish anything on the subject of a letter of mine to my friend Charles Thompson? Certainly not. I write nothing for publication, and last of all things should it be on the subject of religion. On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind. Were I to enter on that arena, I should only add an unit to the number of Bedlamites.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Mathew Carey (11 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, p. 42 1810s

World, Religion, Fight

“Look at Unix. It was essentially open source before anyone invented the term, and that caused a large number of ways to solve the same problem and left the market to sort them out, which they didn't (the market never will sort out bad quality in anything but the single most important property of the products), and Unix got itself into a position where some horribly demented crapware from Microsoft could compete with it and fool a whole bunch of people for a while.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: source access vs dynamism http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e10a8b07a244d7fa (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People, Fools, Way, Problem

“The national research effort, upon which so much depends, will remain healthy only so long as there is sound core of disinterested search for new knowledge and an adequate number of men and women trained for carrying on such research and for teaching young scientists.”

Alan Tower Waterman (1892–1967) American physicist

in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1953), Vol. 9, No. 2,ISSN 0096-3402, published by Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc., p. 38.

Women, Men, Search, Knowledge

“I had by this time heard a number of his public speeches and was beginning to understand the pattern of their appeal. The first secret lay in his choice of words. Every generation develops its own vocabulary of catchwords and phrases, and these date thoughts and utterances. My own father talked like a contemporary of Bismarck, the people of my own age bore the stamp of Wilhelm II, but Hitler had caught the casual camaraderie of the trenches, and without stooping to slang, except for special effects, managed to talk like a member of his audience. In describing the difficulties of the housewife without enough money to buy the buy the food her family needed in the Viktualien Market he would produce just the phrases she would have used herself to describe her difficulties, if she had been able to formulate them. Where other national orators gave the painful impression of talking down to their audience, he had his priceless gift of expressing exactly their own thoughts.”

Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887–1975) German businessman

Quoted in "Hitler: The Missing Years" - Page 67 - by Ernst Hanfstaengl, John Toland - 1994

Money, Pain, People, Secret

“I mean when the war was over they said it was 12 million. Then it was six. Now it’s four. I mean it’s that kind of numbers game

The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.

Nobody wants to have their name, you know, besmirched on the front of newspapers and people say wicked things about them and their family and call them all sorts of names, accuse them of being anti-Semitic and everything else. I mean that’s not part of my design. I don’t enjoy experiencing that. That’s just coming from some place that I have no control over.”

Mel Gibson (1956) American actor, film director, producer and screenwriter

2 August 2006 article http://www.foxnews.com/story/2006/08/02/mel-gibson-holocaust-numbers-gamersquo.html

Death, War, People, World

“Activists laud Beck for establishing cooperative relationships with a number of communities, particularly Latinos and blacks, and for his sophisticated approach to gang crime, which has been cut in half during his tenure.”

Charlie Beck (1953) Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department

December 5, 2014, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck earns good reviews; tough challenges lie ahead, Los Angeles Daily News, August 9, 2014, Brenda Gazzar http://www.dailynews.com/government-and-politics/20140809/lapd-chief-charlie-beck-earns-good-reviews-tough-challenges-lie-ahead, About

Communication

“We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.”

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

A jibe directed at Ramsay MacDonald, during a speech in the House of Commons, March 23, 1933 "European Situation" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1933/mar/23/european-situation#column_544. This quote is similar to a remark (“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met”) made by Abraham Lincoln. [Frederick Trevor Hill credits Lincoln with this remark in Lincoln the Lawyer (1906), adding that ‘History has considerately sheltered the identity of the victim’.] The 1930s

“Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three there is a jump. In the case of quantity there is no such jump, and because jump is missing in the world of quantity it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Bateson (1978) " Number is Different from Quantity http://www.oikos.org/batesnumber.htm". In: CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1978, pp. 44-46

World, Water