Ishan Mukherjee > Ishan's Quotes

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“To reproach Hitchcock for specializing in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who instead of concentrating on his own pleasure insists on sharing it with his partner.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
― P.C. Hodgell, Seeker's Mask

“I once asked him,’ says Marina, ‘when he knew he was dying, and was very upset, that “you contemplate with equanimity eliminating millions of people, yet you cannot deal with your own death.” And he said, “That’s entirely different.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Terrified by the prospect of his own imminent death, von Neumann asked to see the hospital’s Catholic priest and returned to the faith he had ignored ever since his family had converted to it decades earlier in Budapest. ‘There probably is a God,’ he had once told his mother. ‘Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.’
Nicholas could not bring himself to believe that his brother would ‘turn overnight into a devout Catholic’. The change worried von Neumann’s friends too. Ulam wrote to Strauss declaring himself ‘deeply perturbed about the religious angle as it developed’. Marina says her father was thinking of Pascal’s wager and had always believed that in the face of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Another frequent visitor to von Neumann’s bedside was Teller. ‘I have come to suspect,’ he said later, ‘that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny enjoyed it. I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed practically nothing else.’
‘When he was dying of cancer, his brain was affected,’ Teller recalled. ‘I think that he suffered from this loss more than I have seen any human to suffer in any other circumstances.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Jancsi was a formidable mental calculator even as a child. Some sources suggest that he could multiply two eight-digit numbers together in his head when he was six. These abilities, remarkable enough to astonish his early tutors, may have been partly inherited from his maternal grandfather. Though Jacob Kann had no formal education beyond secondary school, he could add or multiply numbers into the millions. Von Neumann would recall his twinkly-eyed grandfather’s mental gymnastics with pride when he was older, but he admitted he was never quite able to match them himself.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann had no interest in sport and, barring long walks (always in a business suit), he would avoid any form of vigorous physical exercise for the rest of his life. When his second wife, Klári, tried to persuade him to ski, he offered her a divorce. ‘If being married to a woman, no matter who she was, would mean he had to slide around on two pieces of wood on some slick mountainside,’ she explained, ‘he would definitely prefer to live alone and take his daily exercise, as he put it, “by getting in and out of a pleasantly warm bathtub”.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“[Von Neumann's childhood home's] library’s centrepiece [was] the Allgemeine Geschichte, a massive history of the world edited by the German historian Wilhelm Oncken, which began in Ancient Egypt and concluded with a biography of Wilhelm I, the first German emperor, commissioned by the Kaiser himself. When von Neumann became embroiled in American politics after he emigrated, he would sometimes avoid arguments that were threatening to become too heated by citing (sometimes word for word) the outcome of some obscurely related affair in antiquity that he had read about in Oncken as a child.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“The young von Neumann made an instant impact on his new tutors. His first mentor, Gábor Szego˝, who would later lead Stanford University’s maths department, was moved to tears after their first meeting.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“[Euclid's] second postulate, for example, says that any line segment may be extended indefinitely. That is difficult for even the most querulous to argue with. The fifth, on the other hand, states that if two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side (labelled a and b in the diagram below) is less than two right angles (i.e. 180°), then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough. If, on the other hand, a and b do add up to 180°, the two lines never meet so are said to be parallel.
To mathematicians, that looks less like a postulate and more like a theorem in need of proving.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Russell’s paradox threatened to deal a far more serious blow to set theory than earlier ideological objections. The problem was this: consider a set of objects – all possible types of cheesecake, say. This set may include any number of different cheesecakes (New York cheesecake, German Käsekuchen, lemon ricotta, etc.) but, because a set is not literally a cheesecake, the set of all cheesecakes is not a member of itself. The set of all things that are not cheesecakes, on the other hand, is a member of itself.
But what, Russell wondered, about the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If this is not a member of itself, then, by definition, it should be (because its members do not include itself). Conversely, if it is a member of itself, then it should not be (because it does). This was Russell’s paradox in a nutshell. His analysis of the paradox revealed it to be similar in form to several others, including the liar’s paradox (‘this statement is a lie’). ‘It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend time on such trivialities,’ he complained, desperate for a solution, ‘but what was I to do?”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann’s remarkable foresight is evident in letters he wrote to Ortvay between 1928 and 1939. ‘There will be a war in Europe in the next decade,’ he told the Hungarian physicist in 1935, further predicting that America would enter the war ‘if England is in trouble’. He feared that during that war, European Jews would suffer a genocide as the Armenians had under the Ottoman Empire. In 1940, he predicted that Britain would be able to hold a German invasion at bay (far from obvious at the time), and that America would join the war the following year (as it did after the bombing of Pearl Harbor).”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Von Neumann enjoyed driving very much but had never passed a test. At Mariette’s suggestion, he bribed a driving examiner. This did nothing to improve his driving. He sped along crowded roads as if they were many-body problems to be negotiated by calculating the best route through on the fly. He often failed, and an intersection in Princeton was soon christened ‘von Neumann corner’ on account of the many accidents he had there. Bored on open roads, he slowed down. When conversation faltered, he would sing; swaying and rocking the steering wheel from side to side with him. The couple would buy a new car every year, usually because von Neumann had totalled the previous one. His vehicle of choice was a Cadillac, ‘because’, he explained whenever anyone asked, ‘no one would sell me a tank’. Miraculously, he escaped largely unscathed from these smash-ups, often returning with the unlikeliest of explanations. ‘I was proceeding down the road,’ begins one fabulous excuse. ‘The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“At one of his ‘high-proof, high-I.Q. parties’ one analyst produced a fat cylindrical ‘coin’ that was something of a RAND obsession at the time. Milled by the RAND machine shop at the behest of Williams, their proportions were carefully chosen so that the chances of falling heads, tails or on its side were equal. Without blinking an eye, von Neumann correctly stated the coin’s dimensions.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“The best estimates of Trinity’s power put the figure somewhere between 20,000 and 22,000 tons. Oppenheimer reached for poetry, recalling a verse from ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, which he had read in the original Sanskrit. ‘Now I am become Death,’ he said, ‘the destroyer of worlds.’ Bainbridge was pithier. ‘Now we are all sons of bitches,’ he told Oppenheimer.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“Did von Neumann understand the potential of the machines he helped to invent? Yes, he did. In reflective mood in 1955, he noted that the ‘over-all capacity’ of computers had ‘nearly doubled every year’ since 1945 and often implied in conversation that he expected that trend to continue. His observations prefigure ‘Moore’s law’, named after Intel’s cofounder Gordon Moore, who predicted in 1965 that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”
― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

“Philosophy is a dangerous thing for any dogmatic religion; it makes people think.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru: Sneak peek into World History and Independent India Before and After Biography Book by Jawaharlal Nehru Penguin Books

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
― David Hume

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet - and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him - and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity - it would be better to live so than die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how - only to live! ...How true! Lord, how true! Man is a scoundrel! And he's a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel for that.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.”
― Salman Rushdie, East, West

“Please, Oh please, publish me in your collection of self-referential sentences!”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”
― Philip Tetlock, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

“We can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.”
― Frank Herbert