Deal Quotes - page 90
A work of genius is a complex object and there is light to be shed about what went into the making of it. Even in the case of scientific and mathematical achievement we can say a great deal about the existing state of knowledge, the problems it failed to address, why those problems were or had become interesting, the particular capacities which the solver brought to their solution. At the other extreme is a work of art which seems to have much more immediate roots in the personal life of the artist or writer. In between is the area in which Keynes worked, which was partly scientific, partly artistic. This gives a wide justification for a biographical approach. As I put it in the introduction to my first volume: 'If underlying Keynesian theory was Keynes's vision of his age, knowledge of his state of mind and the circumstances which formed it is essential, not only in order to understand how he came to see the world as he did, but also in order to pass judgement on the theory itself.
Robert Skidelsky
We don't deliberately desire to scare anybody - we design our creatures to fit in harmony with the story and, of course, our forte is the grotesque. That's why our films were classified so many times as horror films, which they weren't. I would call a war film a horror film because in those you see guts split and people being slaughtered, but our films deal with fantasy and are more theatrical than realistic.
Ray Harryhausen
As long as the activity of linguists was limited to comparing one language with another, this general utility cannot have been apparent to most of the general public, and indeed the study was so specialised that there was no real reason to suppose it of possible interest to a wider audience. It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i. e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone. It is by no means useless, for instance, to those who have to deal with texts. It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.
Ferdinand de Saussure
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however nave that may have been, it was a good deal less nave than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
Flannery O’Connor
I venture to say quite plainly: the oppressed and the exploited have a right to rebel, because they have to reclaim their rights until they enjoy their full share in the common patrimony. The Modern School, however, has to deal with children, whom it prepares by instruction for the state of manhood, and it must not anticipate the cravings and hatreds, the adhesions and rebellions, which may be fitting sentiments in the adult. In other words, it must not seek to gather fruit until it has been produced by cultivation, nor must it attempt to implant a sense of responsibility until it has equipped the conscience with the fundamental conditions of such responsibility. Let it teach the children to be men; when they are men, they may declare themselves rebels against injustice.
Francesc Ferrer i Guardia
Having such a large family can be challenging. I won't deny that. But they're just great kids so you just deal with everything. There's very few things in my life that I regret. If I could change anything, maybe I wish I had learnt and done certain things earlier. I would have liked to have continued in school longer. I would have been interested in living in Africa and perhaps trained as a pediatrician.
Mia Farrow
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
Take the case of a famous problem which plays a great part in the history of Greek geometry, the doubling of the cube, or its equivalent, the finding of two mean proportionals in continued proportion between two given straight lines. ...if all the recorded solutions are collected together, it is much easier to see the relations, amounting in some cases to substantial identity, between them, and to get a comprehensive view of the history of the problem. I have therefore dealt with this problem in a separate section of the chapter devoted to 'Special Problems,' and I have followed the same course with the other famous problems of squaring the circle and trisecting any angle.
Thomas Little Heath
