Weissenberg Number Quotes

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? ~ Madeleine Thien

When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people in it probably hold for you and you go looking for it. If it's not there, you sense it earlier and leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn't, and how little time there is to learn the difference. ~ Dan Simmons

In a world where for pedagogic and other purposes a very large number of economists is required, an arrangement which discourages many of them from ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

It's the secrecy surrounding drone strikes that's most troubling. . . We don't know the targeting criteria, or whether the rules for CIA and military drone strikes differ; we don't know the details of the internal process through which targets are vetted; we don't know the chain of command, or the details of congressional oversight. The United States does not release the names of those killed, or the location or number of strikes, making it impossible to know whether those killed were legitimately viewed as combatants or not. We also don't know the cost of the secret war: How much money has been spent on drone strikes? What's the budget for the related targeting and intelligence infrastructures? How is the government assessing the costs and benefits of counterterrorism drone strikes? That's a lot of secrecy for a targeted killing program that has reportedly caused the deaths of several thousand people. (117-118) ~ Rosa Brooks

I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. ~ Stella Young

A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. ~ Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch

However little president Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics - and especially political rhetoric. 'High-speed rail' is simply another set of loft words to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like 'investment in education' or 'investment' in any number of other things, which serves the same political purpose. ~ Thomas Sowell

I tell people, 'I was born in a little house at the dead end of a dirt road that had no name and no number, and you can go anywhere from nowhere.' ~ Robert H. Schuller

They knew a tremendous number of things - But was it worthwhile knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing? ~ Hermann Hesse

Men with hidden lives don't truly feel connected to people. Their attention is more engaged by excitement, adrenaline, and thrill seeking than by the love of a woman. They desire the high of the moment, the chase, and the challenge of avoiding being caught - by the police, their mothers, or you. (..) They really believe that their lives are their own and they are free to do whatever they want as long as they don't do it in front of you. Rules, laws, society's expectations - all are frivolous to the hidden-life man. (..) The number-one enemy of the hidden-life man is an inquiring mind followed by persistent questions and a lively intuition. ~ Sandra L. Brown

I think US/UK genre has become more open to "diverse" writers and writing; there's a genuine interest in reading work from countries outside the US/UK and hearing voices that have been historically shut out, but at the same time, people are quite lazy. That sounds harsh, but I include myself in it - your tastes are shaped by what you've read and watched before, and it takes a little effort to understand stories that use a different voice, that follow different storytelling conventions, that are trying to subvert the dominant paradigm. There's a quite large group of people who are "yay diversity" in theory, but I think the number of people who have then said to themselves, "OK, if I'm committed to this, I need to start reading outside my comfort zone and making an effort" is maybe a little smaller. ~ Zen Cho

Then we were at the fountain - we stop and look up at the many illuminated windows of number 2.
"This is as far as you can walk me," she says. "Thanks for taking me home."
I bowed, not daring to say a word. I doffed my hat and stood bareheaded. I wondered if she would give me her hand.
"Why don't you ask me to walk back with you part of the way?" She says playfully. But she looks down at the tip of her shoe.
"Gee," I answer, "if only you would!"
"Sure, but only a little way."
And we turned around.
I was utterly bewildered, I didn't know which way was up anymore; this person turned all my thinking topsy-turvy. I was enchanted, wonderfully glad; I felt as though I were dying from happiness. She had expressly wanted to go back with me, it wasn't my idea, it was her own wish. I gaze and gaze at her, growing more and more cocky, and she encourages me, drawing me toward her by every word she speaks. I forget for a moment my poverty, my humble self, my whole miserable existence, I feel the blood coursing warmly through my body as in the old days, before I broke down. ~ Knut Hamsun

Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago. ~ Deborah Blum

When you get a checking account, you should have a savings account, and the number for the savings account should be one off of your checking account. ~ Dan Ariely

Maybe it's true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But you'd go mad reading all of their rough drafts, ~ James Browning

That's always attractive to me, to work with music whose form is a big question mark. Even many of my favorite bands growing up, when I was just a kid learning to play drums and guitar and everything, were bands like Pink Floyd, where the arrangement, the number of bars in each section is unconventional and often lopsided, and there will be small little instrumental interludes and that sort of thing. So those odd forms, as well as dark content, are the things that I think are continuous through all the type of projects that I've been attracted to. ~ Charlie Clouser

A growing number of young women who have the freedom to decide have decided that career can wait, and the delicious early years of their children's lives can't. ~ Suzanne Fields

Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort. ~ Erich Fromm

The frequency of leadership going to the gemba is inversely proportional to the number of walls separating them from the gemba. ~ Jon Miller

If any sort of error is inexcusable, it's an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked. ~ Bill Walsh

But I'm not a serpent, I tell you!" said Alice. "I'm a
I'm a
."
"Well! What are you?" said the Pigeon. "I can see you're trying to invent something!"
"I- I'm a little girl," said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day ...
... "How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one munute to another! However, I've got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden- how is that to be done, I wonder? ~ Lewis Carroll

I've watched what happens when a game like 'DragonVale' gets to number one on iOS. Suddenly there's ten other versions of it that hit the store. As a gamer, that bothers me. I don't like those companies. ~ Mitch Lasky

He smells of beginnings. Beginnings set in motion a long time ago and overlooked. Beginnings which no number of endings could bury. ~ Maggie Harcourt

When I work on a movie, I never aim for records, collections or the number one position. I always concentrate on my work and look for ways to improve my acting abilities. I also advise my co-stars not to concentrate on these pretty issues and just focus on acting. ~ Mahesh Babu

I've been a medical and public health professional as well as a mother. I became skilled at juggling a number of priorities and competing interests. Like many other female leaders, I've tried to serve as a role model for the young women at my organization who are trying to balance a high-level leadership position and a family. ~ Margaret Hamburg

Come to earth to taste our sadness, He whose glories knew no end. By His life He brings us gladness, our Redeemer, Shepherd, Friend. Leaving riches without number, born within a cattle stall. This, the everlasting wonder, Christ was born the Lord of all. ~ Charles Wesley

Mind you, I would not want the pressure of being number one in the world just two years before a World Cup. There is only one way to go and it is not up. ~ David Campese

The destructive potential of language is contained within the very nature of representation. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinite of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories. ~ Charles Eisenstein

I had Elvis' number in my book and I never called it. ~ Mac Davis

Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Babies are equipped at birth with a number of instinctive reflexes and behavior patterns that cause them to spend their first several years trying to kill themselves. If your home contains a sharp, toxic object, your baby will locate it; if your home contains no such object, your baby will try to obtain one via mail order. ~ Dave Barry

There was no reason why Fox, which, by the time I joined, had been in business for nearly a decade and had been number one in the ratings for more than two years, should still have been running such a rinky-dink operation, with broken-down tape machines, control rooms that smelled like a sewer whenever it rained more than half an inch, chronic intentional understaffing, and a workforce composed of barely trained, underpaid children like myself. But that was the business model, and the ratings were good enough - and the on-air product was just this side of mistake-free enough - that there was no incentive for the bosses to change it. ~ Joe Muto

When a liquid boils, the temperature has been raised to such a pitch that the evaporating molecules are sufficient in number and speed to lift off the air from the surface of the liquid and push it back en masse. ~ William Henry Bragg

Nobby had survived any number of famous massacres by not being there. ~ Terry Pratchett

There are, almost by definition, an unlimited number of Hells - potentially at least a personal one for every living sapient being. ~ Terry Pratchett

Under natural conditions, a typical chimpanzee troop consists of about twenty to fifty individuals. As the number of chimpanzees in a troop increases, the social order destabilises, eventually leading to a rupture and the formation of a new troop by some of the animals. Only in a handful of cases have zoologists observed groups larger than a hundred. Separate groups seldom cooperate, and tend to compete for territory and food. Researchers have documented prolonged warfare between groups, and even one case of 'genocidal' activity in which one troop systematically slaughtered most members of a neighbouring band. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

You always said that no one would strive for education if they knew how unbelievably small the number of truly educated people actually was, or ever could be. But that it was impossible to achieve even this small quota of truly educated people unless a great mass of people were tricked, seduced, into going against their nature and pursuing an education. As a result, we must never publicly betray the ridiculous disproportion between the number of truly educated people and the size of our monstrously overgrown educational system. That is the real secret of education, you said: Countless people fight for it, and think they are fighting for themselves, but at bottom it is only to make education possible for a very few. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own. ~ Jeanette Winterson

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. ~ John Updike

Uncoupling is primarily a tale of two transitions: one that begins before the other. Most often, one person wants out while the other person wants the relationship to continue. Although both partners must go through all the same stages of the transition in order to uncouple, the transition begins and ends at different times for each. By the time the still-loving partner realizes the relationship is in serious trouble, the other person is already gone in a number of ways. The rejected partner then embarks on a transition that the other person began long before. ~ Diane Vaughan

One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you. ~ Cathy Park Hong

There are 15 main theories in physics, and we know all of them. If there weren't a finite number of theories, there would not be a point to physics. ~ Ivar Giaever

The expansionary operations of the Second Bank of the United States, coupled with its laxity toward insisting on specie payment by the state banks, impelled a further inflationary expansion of state banks on top of the spectacular enlargement of the central bank. Thus, the number of incorporated state banks rose from 232 in 1816 to 338 in 1818. ~ Murray Rothbard

My number one advice to high school girls is birth control. You want to keep all your options open for as long as possible? Birth control. ~ Elizabeth Banks