David Berlinski QUOTES

21 " We are finite creatures, bound to this place and this time, and helpless before an endless expanse. It is within the calculus that for the first time the infinite is charmed into compliance, its luxuriance subordinated to the harsh concept of a limit. "

― David Berlinski

22 " But of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to the general proscription against gluttony, and once engaged, even if engaged initially in the service of religion, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly, until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself. "

― David Berlinski , The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

23 " The advent of militant atheism marks a reaction—a lurid but natural reaction—to the violence of the Islamic world. "

― David Berlinski , The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

24 " In his introduction to Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, T. E. Lawrence attempted to describe the character of the desert Arabs that both he and Doughty had admired. “They are the least morbid of peoples,” Lawrence wrote, “who take the gift of life unquestioningly, as an axiom. "

― David Berlinski , One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics

25 " It is in the world of things and places, times and troubles and turbid
processes, that mathematics is not so much applied as illustrated. "

― David Berlinski

26 " No doubt, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played. The theory is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are in Darwin's scheme no biotic laws, no Bauplan as in German natural philosophy, no special creation, no elan vital, no divine guidance or transcendental forces. The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes, and living creatures are said to be something that the gods of law indifferently sanction and allow. "

― David Berlinski , The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays

27 " Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The lame and the blind excepted, who could object? "

― David Berlinski , The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

28 " No very good sense can be given to the idea that the elements of Euclidean geometry may be found in nature because either everything is found in nature or nothing is. Euclidean geometry is a theory, and the elements of a theory may be interpreted only in terms demanded by the theory itself. Euclid’s axioms are satisfied in the Euclidean plane. Nature has nothing to do with it. "

― David Berlinski , The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements

29 " The apes are, after all, behind the bars of their cages, and we are not. Eager for the experiments to begin, they are also impatient for their food to be served, and they seem impatient for little else. After undergoing years of punishing trials at the hands of determined clinicians, a few have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say. When two simian prodigies meet, they fling their placards at each other. "

― David Berlinski

30 " If the calculus is much like a cathedral, its construction the work of centuries, it remained until the nineteenth century a cathedral suspiciously suspended in midair, the thing simply hanging there, with no one absolutely convinced that one day the gorgeous and elaborate structure would not come crashing down and fracture in a thousand pieces. "

― David Berlinski

31 " My own view, repeated in virtually all of my essays, is that the sense of skepticism engendered by the sciences would be far more appropriately directed toward the sciences than toward anything else. "

― David Berlinski , The Deniable Darwin

32 " A function indicates a relationship in prospect, and so belongs to a family of concepts. Relationship, as in related; relationship, as in connected, corresponding to or caused by, united or bound together; relationship, as in linked or yoked, coupled or conjoined, associated or allied. Relationship, as in dependent, indeed, relationship, as in function of,
at which point the moving conceptual point may be seen revolving around the perimeter of a circle. "

― David Berlinski

33 " Of all the human emotions, curiosity is the one least subject to gluttony. Once engaged, it has a tendency to grow relentlessly until in the end the scholar becomes curious about the nature of revelation itself. "

― David Berlinski

34 " The overall structure of the calculus is simple. The subject is defined by a fantastic leading idea, one basic axiom, a calm and profound intellectual invention, a deep property, two crucial definitions, one ancillary definition, one major theorem, and the fundamental theorem of the calculus.
The fantastic leading idea: the real world may be understood in terms of the real numbers.
The basic axiom: brings the real numbers into existence.
The calm and profound invention: the mathematical function.
The deep property: continuity.
The crucial definitions: instantaneous speed and the area underneath a curve.
The ancillary definition: a limit
The major theorem: the mean value theorem.
The fundamental theorem of the calculus is the fundamental theorem of the calculus.
These are the massive load-bearing walls and buttresses of the subject. "

― David Berlinski

35 " For anyone wishing to argue that once things were worse than they are now, the Middle Ages are ideal. It is widely supposed that having gotten out of them was one of the accomplishments of modern civilization. No contemporary scholar, one might think, would make such a mistake in judgment. A one-man multitude, Pinker champions the case to the contrary. “The people of the middle ages were, in a word, gross.”31 "

― David Berlinski , Human Nature

36 " In time freed from public fornication, the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were occupied in killing one another in tavern brawls or over tavern wenches; at the dinner table, lacking access to the fork, they used their knives to settle slights as well as scores.33 "

― David Berlinski , Human Nature

37 " The image of the fundamental laws of physics zestfully wrestling with the void to bring the universe into being is one that suggests very little improvement over the accounts given by the ancient Norse in which the world is revealed to be balanced on the back of a gigantic ox. "

― David Berlinski , The Deniable Darwin

38 " Medieval homicide rates are very sensitive to population estimates. Of course they are. In his study, Plantagenet England, Michael Prestwich found reason to revise previous population estimates for medieval London; and with previous population estimates, previous homicide rates.51 One estimate of London’s population in the mid-fourteenth century puts the figure between thirty-five and fifty thousand: H/P ≈ 44 per 100,000. The true population of London, Prestwich argued, was somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and seventy-six thousand inhabitants: H/P ≈ 18 per 100,000. "

― David Berlinski , Human Nature

39 " The rational alternative to Darwin’s theory is intelligent uncertainty. "

― David Berlinski , The Deniable Darwin

40 " Steven Pinker does not, of course, deny the magnitude of these crimes; he scruples at their relative importance. “If I were one of the people who were alive in a particular era,” he asks, “what would be the chances that I would be a victim of violence?”73 The question provides its own answer. There is safety in numbers. Is there? Is there really? An individual x selected at random is a commonplace in the theory of probability, where x is who he is and S is the population in which he is embedded. In the twentieth century, just what risk was he running to—or fleeing from? It was, Pinker affirms, the risk of being “a victim of violence.” This comes close to cant. If the victims of violence are left undefined, they tend to multiply uncontrollably, the more so if violence is treated as a sinister, but shapeless, force. The Holocaust, the Nuremburg court affirmed, was a crime against humanity. The judgment was morally correct because morally unavoidable, but if the entire human race has, for this reason, been a victim of violence, there are no statistical distinctions left to draw. "

― David Berlinski , Human Nature

1
2
3