David Berlinski Quotes

29 quotes in 701 categories

• Darwin's theory of evolution is the last of the great nineteenth-century mystery religions. And as we speak it is now following Freudians and Marxism into…
• There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this…
• Ultimately, Leibniz argued, there are only two absolutely simple concepts, God and Nothingness. From these, all other concepts may be constructed, the world, and everything…
• If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God,…
• Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse…
• Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery,…
• Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one,
• I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.
• Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.
• While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love and meaning, what the religious traditions of…
• Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and…
• The definition of a limit is essentially his [Cauchy's] creation and is as much of a miracle as those fantastic Swiss clocks of the period…
• The calculus is the story this [the Western] world first told itself as it became the modern world.
• Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.
• An axiomatic system establishes a reverberating relationship between what a mathematician assumes (the axioms) and what he or she can derive (the theorems). In the…
• An axiomatic system comprises axioms and theorems and requires a certain amount of hand-eye coordination before it works. A formal system comprises an explicit list…
• For the most part, it is true, ordinary men and women regard mathematics with energetic distaste, counting its concepts as rhapsodic as cauliflower. This is…
• Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.
• For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took…
• Bystanders wandered in and out of the merchant's stall, passing the time, talking of dreams they might purchase. Workers and slaves stooped from labor asked…

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