Perhaps the most surprising thing about mathematics is that it is so s — Leonhard Euler

"Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate."

"La construction dune machine propre à exprimer tous les sons de nos paroles , avec toutes les articulations , seroit sans-doute une découverte bien importante. … La chose ne me paroît pas impossible."

"Now I will have less distraction."

"A function of a variable quantity is an analytic expression composed in any way whatsoever of the variable quantity and numbers or constant quantities."

"To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be."

"Madam, I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"