Ingenuity Quotes - page 7
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.
Alan Turing
Wealth in the modern world does not come merely from individual effort; it results from a combination of individual effort and of the manifold uses to which the community puts that effort. The individual does not create the product of his industry with his own hands; he utilizes the many processes and forces of mass production to meet the demands of a national and international market. Therefore, in spite of the great importance in our national life of the efforts and ingenuity of unusual individuals, the people in the mass have inevitably helped to make large fortunes possible. Without mass cooperation great accumulations of wealth would be impossible save by unhealthy speculation. As Andrew Carnegie put it, "Where wealth accrues honorably, the people are always silent partners."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. So it's never old news to deal with the intersection of human desire and ingenuity. As biohacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and the plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, we explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer.
Johannes Grenzfurthner
In 1931, W. E. B. Du Bois attacked the decision to erect Confederate monuments as ahistorical and irresponsible: "The most terrible thing about War, I am convinced, is its monuments-the awful things we are compelled to build in order to remember the victims. In the South, particularly, human ingenuity has been put to it to explain on its war monuments, the Confederacy. Of course, the plain truth of the matter would be an inscription something like this: "Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery." But that reads with increasing difficulty as time goes on. It does, however, seem to be overdoing the matter to read on a North Carolina Confederate monument: "Died Fighting for Liberty!"
W. E. B. Du Bois
A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool - technological brother to the hoe, the wrench, the hammer - and yet as far a cry from these as the human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There'd never be an end, he thought - no end to anything.
Clifford D. Simak
Sheckley at his best is nobody but Sheckley; his ability to make what may roughly he described as moral points with a sort of genial free-wheeling ingenuity is purely his own. There is also a second-best Sheckley, when it is obvious that he is not trying very hard; then the unlikeliness of his stories becomes tedious and often enough the genial note turns sour and snickery; in this phase, he writes like John Collier in a shabby grotesque mask. There is also a third Sheckley, have none of the Sheckley aura about...
Robert Sheckley
It is in this situation that political partisanship can serve to counteract the increasing tendency to look inwards, in extreme instances the scholiasm, the tendency to develop intellectual ingenuity for its own sake, the self-insulation of the academy. It may indeed fall victim to the same dangers itself, if a sufficiently large 'field' of a self-insulated partisan scholarship develops.
Eric Hobsbawm
Puerto Ricans...castrate their children. As a reality check. Because they know the colonial systems will not allow their children to achieve all the things that they want in life. I saw that in my childhood. I saw this impotence that was imposed on me since my childhood. But I said, "I'm going to build an empire of uselessness. I'm going to take from the Americans the ingenuity, and I'm going to take from the Spaniards the wisdom.” And that's what I do. I mix wisdom and ingenuity.
Giannina Braschi
The birth and inauguration of the generic telegraph has not only opened a new field for the labors, and given direction to the ingenuity of the mechanician, suggesting numerous varieties of form and distribution of parts, but it has also give a fresh impulse to the researches of the philosopher into the mysteries of the most efficient agent, electricity. It has been the servant of the astronomer; it has assisted in the determination of longitudes; ... it has promoted the science of meteorology, and been tributary in many ways to the advancement of our knowledge of terrestrial phenomena. ...
Samuel F. B. Morse
