David Berlinski Quotes

#1. Whatever the degree to which Darwin may have "misled science into a dead end," the biologist Shi V. Liu observed in commenting on Koonin's paper, "we may still appreciate the role of Darwin in helping scientists [win an] upper hand in fighting against the creationists.

David Berlinski

#2. Did you imagine that science was a disinterested pursuit of the truth? Well, you were wrong.

David Berlinski

#3. 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

#4. For all the great dreams profitlessly invested in the digital computer, it is nonetheless true that not since the framers of the American Constitution took seriously the idea that all men are created equal has an idea so transformed the material conditions of life, the expectations of the race.

David Berlinski

#5. Bystanders wandered in and out of the merchant's stall, passing the time, talking of dreams they might purchase. Workers and slaves stooped from labor asked timidly for dreams of wine and ease. Women asked for dreams of love, and men for dreams of women.

David Berlinski

#6. Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one,

David Berlinski

#7. "Young men wish always to dream of what they have lost."
"And old men?"
"Of what they have not found."

David Berlinski

#8. No man is obliged to be what he might have been.

David Berlinski

#9. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.

David Berlinski

#10. More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends.

David Berlinski

#11. Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

David Berlinski

#12. Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

David Berlinski

#13. However good an argument in philosophy may happen to be, it is generally not good enough.

David Berlinski

#14. At the beginning of the new millennium, we still do not know why mathematics is true and whether it is certain. But we know what we do not know in an immeasurably richer way than we did. And learning this has been a remarkable achievement-among the greatest and least-known of the modern era.

David Berlinski

#15. No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: the chimpanzees invariably are the one behind the bars of their cages.

David Berlinski

#16. Aristotelian logic is massive and marmoreal, but every monument accumulates graffiti.

David Berlinski

#17. In the end, every scheme and every science is justified by itself or it is not justified at all.

David Berlinski

#18. Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.

David Berlinski

#19. The advent of militant atheism marks a reaction - a lurid but natural reaction - to the violence of the Islamic world.

David Berlinski

#20. The definition of a limit is essentially his [Cauchy's] creation and is as much of a miracle as those fantastic Swiss clocks of the period in which hundreds of gleaming cogs are made to celebrate not only the time and date but the phases of the moon.

David Berlinski

#21. For the most part, it is true, ordinary men and women regard mathematics with energetic distaste, counting its concepts as rhapsodic as cauliflower. This is a mistake-there is no other word. Where else can the restless human mind find means to tie the infinite in a finite bow?

David Berlinski

#22. There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that this is so. It is simply a fact, Darwin's theory and the fossil record are in conflict.

David Berlinski

#23. Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world.

David Berlinski

#24. The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.

David Berlinski

#25. 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

#26. Some philosophers see into themselves, and some into their times; still others forge an alliance with the future.

David Berlinski

#27. 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