#them

People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate “deeper” truths, such as “1 and 1 make 1” (for lovers), or “1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1” (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a window-pane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds -more evidence of the same? It is not at all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition”, and where some other word is wanted. If you think about the question, you will probably come up with some criterion involving separation of the objects in space, and making sure each one is clearly distinguishable from all the others. But then how could one count ideas? Or the number of gases comprising the atmosphere? Somewhere, if you try to look it up, you can probably fin a statement such as, “There are 17 languages in India, and 462 dialects.” There is something strange about the precise statements like that, when the concepts “language” and “dialect” are themselves fuzzy. ↗

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

#mathematics #truth #equality

I have my own opinions, but my songs don't share them. ↗

— Shania Twain

#my own #opinions #own #share #songs

There is nothing a woman can't do. Men might think they do things all by themselves but a woman is always there guiding them or helping them. ↗

— Marjorie Joyner

#guiding #helping #men #might #nothing

And Big Night, I think by the end the brothers find that balance, when they touch each other on the shoulder over breakfast and it's understood that what should never have driven them apart almost drove them apart. I think that's a true moment. ↗

— Tony Shalhoub

#apart #balance #big #big night #breakfast

I abandoned the assigned problems in standard calculus textbooks and followed my curiosity. Wherever I happened to be--a Vegas casino, Disneyland, surfing in Hawaii, or sweating on the elliptical in Boesel's Green Microgym--I asked myself, "Where is the calculus in this experience? ↗

— Jennifer Ouellette

#life-lessons #mathematics #experience

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them. ↗

— Anacharsis

#easily #hold #laws #like #only

Wise men argue causes; fools decide them. ↗

— Anacharsis

#causes #decide #fools #men #them

You remember all those phrases about how "these people" - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese. ↗

— Neil Sheehan

#any #around #asians #certainly #children

Trust me, you have to fight. When people are wrong, you've got to let them know it. ↗

— Orlando Cepeda

#got #know #me #people #them

The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting. ↗

— Alan Brien

#been #being #collecting #congenial #debt