In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished—a word that for them has no sense—but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.
--
Charmes. Le Cimeti?re MarinPaul Valery
A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
Paul Valery
General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.
Margaret Mead
A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.
Leo Szilard
From the lightning and the tempest,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the scourge of the earthquake,
O Lord, deliver us.
From plague, famine, and war,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the place of ground zero,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the rain of the cobalt,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the rain of the strontium,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the fall of the cesium,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the curse of the Fallout,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the begetting of monsters,
O Lord, deliver us.
From the curse of the Misborn,
O Lord deliver us. ~ Ch 2Walter M. (Jr.) Miller
There are two great men in history with whom he [Wittgenstein] somewhat resembles. One was Pascal, other was Tolstoy. Pascal was a mathematician of genius, but abandoned mathematics for piety. Tolstoy sacrificed his genius as a writer to a kind of bogus humility which made him prefer peasants to educated men and Uncle Tom's Cabin to all other works of fiction. Wittgenstein, who could play with metaphysical intricacies as cleverly as Pascal with Hexagons or Tolstoy with emperors, threw away this talent and debased himself before the peasants — in each case from an impulse of pride. I admired Wittgenstein's Tractus but not his later work, which seemed to me to me to involve an abnegation of his own best talent very similar to those of Pascal and Tolstoy.... [M]ental torments which made him and Pascal and Tolstoy pardonable in spite of their treachery to their own greatness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Valery, Paul
Vallejo, Cesar
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z