Quadratic Quotes

#1. I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

Terry Pratchett

#2. In later life, people will be impressed that you can quote Shakespeare, and you will sound very intelligent. It's harder to quote trigonometry, or quadratic equations, and not half as romantic.

John Connolly

#3. Everyone hated Calculus. Quadratic equations, parabolas, logarithms, trigonometry - you name it. It was like floating in an endless, frictionless void traveling at x miles per hour at a descension rate of one half the speed of gravity. Solve for x.

Andrew Sturm

#4. Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation ... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

Leonard Woolf

#5. the problem is then to develop a theory of invariance with respect to arbitrary linear transformations, in which, however, in contra-distinction to the case of affine geometry, we have a definite invariant quadratic form, viz. the metrical groundform once and for all as an absolute datum.

Hermann Weyl

#6. All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

Michael Cunningham

#7. What will maintain the pinnacle position of our nation in the world: the ability to shoot a 25-foot jump shot, or the ability to solve a quadratic equation?

Ben Carson

#8. How obvious, now, was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended there, in only three dimensions!

Arthur C. Clarke

#9. What grinds me the most is that we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world?

Chris Colfer

#10. The singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane's dimensions, the triadic beginning of pi, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.

Umberto Eco

#11. Aspiring to these wide generalizations, the analysis of quadratic functions soars to a pitch from whence it may look proudly down on the feeble and vain attempts of geometry proper to rise to its level or to emulate it in its flights.

James Joseph Sylvester

#12. I've said it before: equations are the devil's sentences. The worst one is that quadratic equation, an infernal salad of numbers, letters, and symbols.

Stephen Colbert

#13. The nature of risk may be the single most important argument for the use of quantitative analysis in investment management. Neither Investors nor Analysts can be blamed for this fact. Nor can Harry Markowitz. Nature made risk a quadratic function. Markowitz only discovered it.

William Sharpe

#14. This specter of the female politician, who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in parliament, is just as complete an illusion of the masculine brain, as the other specter whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,
the woman who would forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.

Frances Power Cobbe

#15. Forty-one was a very special number, the initial integer in the longest continuous string of quadratic primes.

Arthur C. Clarke

#16. It can be argued that the mathematics behind these images [of the orbit diagram for quadratic functions and the Mandelbrot set] is even prettier than the pictures themselves.

Robert L. Devaney

#17. It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tend to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.

Terry Pratchett

#18. Quadratic reciprocity is the song of love in the land of prime numbers.

Kato

#19. Not a lot of people know this, but I'm very good at mathematics. When I was an angry teenager, I used to sit in my room and do quadratic equations to calm myself down.

Samantha Bond

#20. There is an anti-aging possibility, but it has to come from within.

Susan Anton

#21. There's no use in weeping,
Though we are condemned to part:
There's such a thing as keeping,
A remembrance in one's heart ...

Charlotte Bronte

#22. I just stood there staring, because while I've seen a lot of weird things, I hadn't ever seen that.

Jim Butcher

#23. I think we need to tell each other everything we've found out. And it'll take us a good long time, and we might as well keep our hands busy while we're doing it, so

Philip Pullman

#24. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#25. Let us be as the Cage has never been able to make us. Let us now all at once face forward in our boxes, still and silent as nightmares.
We did.

Adam Levin

#26. I didn't want to die. I was just trying to feel something.

Emery Lord

#27. I was once that little boy
Terrified of the world, now I'm on a world tour

Lupe Fiasco

#28. I love women. I get along with women more than men, and I have more women friends.

Alber Elbaz

#29. So our narcissism has bared forth an unflattering nakedness that shames our species. But this is humanity. This is our condition.

Zack Love

#30. I have found so much joy and so much pride in contributing and being a team member, and then stepping back and watching someone else get the applause. That has been really satisfying in a way that I wouldn't have probably imagined.

Sara Bareilles

#31. Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

Frederick C. Beiser