Calculating Quotes - Page 3

• Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?

  Alfred Kazin

  Literature, Pseudo, Spirit

  Alfred Kazin (2013). “On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature”, p.62, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• When a peasant begins to feel the need for instruction, he usually becomes fiercely calculating.

  Emile Zola

  Needs, Instruction, Peasants

  4 Copy quote

• The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed.

  William O. Douglas

  Law, Machines, Tumbling

  "The Dissent: A Safeguard of Democracy". William O. Douglas, "Journal of the American Judicature Society", Volume 32, 1948.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• How, then, find the courage for action? By slipping a little into unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct which holds one to the earth and dictates the relatively good and useful. By accepting the human condition more simply, and candidly, by dreading troubles less, calculating less, hoping more.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Earth, Littles, Slipping

  7 Copy quote

• Art begins when an observer's sensibilities engage with the understatements of a calculating craftsman.

  Sara Genn

  Art, Craftsman, Understatement

  4 Copy quote

• The notion that a society could be regulated entirely by market forces is a utopian fantasy: an impossible dream generated by imagining what the world would be like if everyone's behavior was utterly consistent with some abstract moral ideal-in this case, economic theories that assume all human action is based on calculating, systematic, (but scrupulously law-abiding), greed.

  David Graeber

  Dream, Law, Greed

  17 Copy quote

• Avarice has ruined more men than prodigality, and the blindest thoughtlessness of expenditure has not destroyed so many fortunes as the calculating but insatiable lust of accumulation.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Men, Lust, Fortune

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.153

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

  Allan Bloom

  Hands, Erotic, Feelings

  Allan David Bloom (1993). “Love and Friendship”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• A cold, calculating nightmare. Sharp as a finely honed blade. 'The Lucid Dreaming' cuts, separating the flesh before you even know you've been injured. It makes you bleed as a reader.

  Del Howison

  Dream, Cutting, Flesh

  4 Copy quote

• Few nations do more than the United States to assist their least fortunate citizens-to make certain that no child, no elderly or handicapped citizen, no family in any circumstances in any State, is left without the essential needs for a decent and healthy existence. In too few nations, I might add, are the people aware of the progressive strides this country has taken in demonstrating the humanitarian side of freedom. Our record is a proud one-and it sharply refutes those who accuse us of thinking only in the materialistic terms of cash registers and calculating machines.

  John F. Kennedy

  Country, Children, Taken

  4 Copy quote

• A calculating engine is one of the most intricate forms of mechanism, a telegraph key one of the simplest. But compare their value.

  George Iles

  Science, Keys, Form

  George Iles (1918). “Canadian Stories”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.

  James Joyce

  Persistence, Independence, Apathy

  "Daniel Defoe". Book by James Joyce, translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, pp. 24-25, 1964.

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• Good players develop a tactical instinct, a sense of what is possible or likely and what is not worth calculating.

  Samuel Reshevsky

  Player, Tactics, Chess

  11 Copy quote

• Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes, and laugh in a cold calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, favor beards.

  J. B. Morton

  Children, Food, Eye

  46 Copy quote

• I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn.

  Archimedes

  Education, Math, Littles

  39 Copy quote

• We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature.... No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics-back to the jungle.

  Max Frisch

  Men, Light, Bridges

  Max Frisch (2006). “Homo Faber”, p.131, Penguin UK

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I consider what people generally want in calculating, I found that it always is a number. I also observed that every number is composed of units, and that any number may be divided into units. Moreover, I found that every number which may be expressed from one to ten, surpasses the preceding by one unit: afterwards the ten is doubled or tripled just as before the units were: thus arise twenty, thirty, etc. until a hundred: then the hundred is doubled and tripled in the same manner as the units and the tens, up to a thousand;… so forth to the utmost limit of numeration.

  Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi

  Numbers, People, Limits

  187 Copy quote

• Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet

  Fernando Pessoa

  Hurt, Book, Imagination

  Fernando Pessoa (2002). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.155, Penguin UK

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine.

  Aneurin Bevan

  Children, Party, Moving

  In Michael Foot 'Aneurin Bevan' (1973) vol. 2, ch. 11

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones.

  Georg Simmel

  Determination, People, World

  Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff (1950). “The Sociology of Georg Simmel”, p.412, Simon and Schuster

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Struggle, Sacrifice, Effort

  "Justice and fraternity". Journal des Économistes, June 15, 1848.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing...Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.

  Oswald Chambers

  Sadness, Mean, Expression

  4 Copy quote

• I love you, i love your smile your snarl your grin, your face when your sleeping.I love your hair streaming behind you as we fly, with the sunlight making it shine, if it doesn't have too much mud or blood in it, I love seeing your wings spreading out, white and brown and tan and speckled, and the tiny downy feathers right at the top of your shoulders. I love your eyes, whether they're cold or calculating or suspicious or laughing or warm, like when you look at me.

  James Patterson

  Love You, Sleep, Eye

  5 Copy quote

• Pierce made a calculating noise, accidentally brushing my knee as he shifted. "As Jenks would say, you snore nice." I smiled back unconvincingly. I snore nice. Not "I opine that your auditory nasal exhalations are most pleasing.

  Kim Harrison

  Nice, Noise, Knees

  4 Copy quote

• Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiousity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion for sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth.

  Philip Pullman

  Kindness, Regret, Compassion

  Philip Pullman (2007). “The Amber Spyglass”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  6 Copy quote

  Show source