| Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. | |
| Joyce Carol Oates, | 1588 |
| Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship. | |
| Barack Hussein Obama, from his Inaugural Address, 1/20/2009. | 1352 |
| A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good. | |
| Barack Hussein Obama, from his Inaugural Address, 1/20/2009. | 1351 |
| We will restore science to its rightful place. | |
| Barack Hussein Obama, from his Inaugural Address, 1/20/2009. | 1350 |
| In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh. Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction. | |
| Barack Hussein Obama, from his Inaugural Address, 1/20/2009. | 1349 |
| We don't accomplish anything in this world alone. and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something. | |
| Sandra Day O'Connor, | 1446 |
| Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got. | |
| Flannery O'Connor, from Wise Blood. | 1256 |
| Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. | |
| Flannery O'Connor, quoted in The Fourth, and By Far the Most Recent, 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, by Robert Byrne. | 280 |
| We were frustrated with computers a decade ago, we are frustrated with them now, and will continue to be frustrated in the future. As long as technology offers enticing new products and services, we will continue to live on the edge of intolerable frustration. | |
| Andrew M. Odlyzko, | 958 |
| Astronomers use telescopes and laboratory scientists use microscopes to aid them in seeing more clearly the subjects of their research. For the same purpose mathematics sometimes use mathescopes. But a mathescope is not a physical instrument. It is an intellectual instrument, with reason for its pedestal and inspiration for its lenses. No one has ever seen a methescope. But then, neither has anyone every seen an integral, or a geometric point, or, for that matter, a number… Mathematicians, as we shall see, deal not with tangibles but with ideas. | |
| C. Stanley Ogilvy, Excursions in Mathematics, p. vi. | 1248 |
| Mathematics is a process of contstructing knowledge, not acquiring it. | |
| Susan Ohanian, from Garbage Pizzas, Patchwork Quilts, and Math Magic. | 580 |
| My husband is a physicist. He was "embarrassed" to marry someone who never took calculus. On our first Christmas he gave me this big, fat calculus book. On our second Christmas I gave him a writer's notebook - full of all of the answers to the questions in the calculus textbook.
Doing calculus for love is a better reason than we generally give kids in school. | |
| Susan Ohanion, at AERO Conference, Albany, N.Y., 6/26/2009. | 1238 |
| My twenty years in my own classroom tells me that children's significant discoveries are never in the lesson plan. Almost no education outsiders, and a minority of insiders, understand this very basic fact about the way the schools work. | |
| Susan Ohanian, from Garbage Pizzas, Patchwork Quilts and Math Magic. | 759 |
| Children need to do what "real" mathematicians do - explore and invent for the rest of their lives. | |
| Susan Ohanian, from Garbage Pizzas, Patchwork Quilts and Math Magic. | 758 |
| Teaching children how to make choices is risky business, and we are increasingly becoming a society that prefers a pre-packaged curriculum to the vagaries of individual judgment, a society whose leaders confuse a facile declaration of educational standards with a genuine commitment to educational excellence. | |
| Susan Ohanian, quoted in "Pushing a Dead Literacy Can Kill Kids Love of Reading." | 281 |
| The brain/mind is not like anything else. If the maximum weight I can lift with my single arm is 70 lbs., it will also be the same the next day, and the day after, etc. It will take a long time before lifting that weight becomes easier. But with problem-solving techniques it is instantaneous. If I learn how to solve a particular kind of problem, no matter what its degree of difficulty, it is a done-deal. Next time it is no longer difficult. | |
| Tom O'Neill, quoted in The problem of measure invariance by B.D. Wright, M. Huber, T. O'Neill, J.M. Linacre, Rasch Measurement Transactions, 2000, 14: 2, p. 745 | 874 |
| What we are doing in number theory is building theoretical telescopes. | |
| Ken Ono, from Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference XIII, Westfield State College, 4/8/06 | 976 |
| We have enough people who tell it like it is -- now we could use a few who tell it like it can be. | |
| Robert Orben, quoted in Wisdom for the New Millennium edited by Helen Exley. | 1072 |
| The calculus is the greatest aid we have to the appreciation of physical truth in the broadest sense of the word. | |
| W. F. Osgood, quoted in Bulletin American Mathematical Society, | 282 |
19 quotes found and displayed.