How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

by Jordan Ellenberg

People like that, the quibblers and the naysayers and the maybesayers, don’t make things happen. When one wants to denounce those people, it’s customary to quote Theodore Roosevelt, from his speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered in Paris in 1910, shortly after the end of his presidency: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.