Jews

"If anyone was questioning whether or not Peter Schiff was truly a Republican, he's certainly made it clear today. After eight years of the Bush Administration's lax regulation and market-first mentality, the last thing we need is to further reduce regulation and allow Wall Street to run the show. Chris Dodd is leading the way to put a balance back into a system that for years has been too far out of whack and ensure that consumers are protected first and foremost."

"Dodd's proposal takes regulatory authority away from one unaccountable institution and gives it to another even bigger one. This will not solve our problems."

"Existing regulators had all the powers they needed, and more, and they failed miserably to foresee and prevent this crisis. Chris Dodd is now asking us to put all our eggs in one basket and trust a "super regulatory agency." He should know better than to centralize power in the hands of Washington bureaucrats - it's precisely the arrangement that caused our current problems. I think most Connecticut voters know that we need fewer czars in Washington, not more. As long as Fannie and Freddie and Congress are meddling with the economy, changing the structure of the regulators is basically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

"Transferring regulatory authority from one unaccountable agency to another will not solve any problems."

"I'm interrupting my career. It's not like I want my new career in politics. But I'm willing to interrupt it the same way that somebody interrupted their career and joined World War II and went off to fight the Nazis. I don't think that I'm that heroic, and I don't think I'm risking as much as a soldier. But it's the same principle."

"Too many people in Connecticut are struggling right now, and the last thing we need is meddling politicians making things worse. Only by cutting deficit spending, reducing burdensome regulations, and letting people keep more of their hard-earned dollars will we get our economy back on track."

"What America has succeeded in creating is not an economy impervious to shocks, but merely one which enables their consequences to be postponed to a later date."

"[Consumer credit] is like giving yourself a blood transfusion from your left arm to your right. Nothing is accomplished, except the possibility of spilling blood on the floor. But it's not even that benign."

"Nobody is entitled to someone else's money, that is the bottom line. People think they are entitled to it because they think they paid into it, nobody paid into anything, it was a fraud. Every single dollar that the gov collected in social security taxes, has already been spent, there is nothing there, there is no money, so the only money the government gets to make current payment is the money it can take from people who are still working. Its a transfer from the working poor in many cases to the retired rich. We don't have the money, I feel bad for the fact people made promises we can't keep, I feel bad for the people that invested with Bernie Madoff and lost their money, but its the same principle, its the same Ponzi scheme. We have to put an end to it, we have to find real solution to these problems because if we keep on denying that they exist and keep on spending money, we're going to destroy the value of everyone's benefits."

"The real bubble in China is in US Treasuries, in US dollars."

"When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed."

"There are no checks and balances if the gov is wrong, if a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut, if he bets wrong, he loses, if the gov bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money, it's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press."

"I'm not saying it wasn't a crime. I just saying it's not pedophilia. When I was in college I had sex with under age girls. That doesn't make me a pedophile."

"“Which is Better: the Latke or the Hamantash?” is not a valid question, even though this has now been debated for 50 years. * The question does not exhibit the necessary property of universality. * It is culturally biased, implies gender specificity, exhibits geographical chauvinism and appeals to special interests. * It is not value-free. This question would not pass scrutiny on an SAT test, since it unfairly favors one ethnic and gender group over another: e.g., it favors the NY and Brooklyn establishment over the Midwest Rust Belt, and pits female latke workers against male hamantash bakers. In short, it is Politically Incorrect. Physics does not ask which is better: the proton or neutron, baryon or lepton, helium or neon, the conductor or insulator. These are simply properties of nature. Rather, physics asks: “Why?” or “Which is more important or more fundamental?” or “Who published it first?”"

"I read once that the true mark of a pro — at anything — is that he understands, loves, and is good at even the drudgery of his profession."

"I was too near it then to see how shallow it all was..."

"It takes a long time to learn to live — by the time you learn your time is gone."

"I like words more than numbers, and I always did."

"What does it take to be [a mathematician]? I think I know the answer: you have to be born right, you must continually strive to become perfect, you must love mathematics more than anything else, you must work at it hard and without stop, and you must never give up."

"Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own question, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?"

"Mathematics is not a deductive science — that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork. You want to find out what the facts are, and what you do is in that respect similar to what a laboratory technician does. Possibly philosophers would look on us mathematicians the same way as we look on the technicians, if they dared."

"'André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative powers to intervene and set things right. That's one of the proper functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity."

"The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces."

"I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: "Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)." The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East. First, the Arabs will stop using children as shields. Second, they will stop taking hostages knowing that we will not be intimidated. Third, with their holy sites destroyed, they will stop believing that G-d is on their side. Result: no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war. Zero tolerance for stone throwing, for rockets, for kidnapping will mean that the state has achieved sovereignty. Living by Torah values will make us a light unto the nations who suffer defeat because of a disastrous morality of human invention."

"I would like to clarify the answer published in my name in last month’s issue of Moment Magazine. First of all, the opinions published in my name are solely my own, and do not represent the official policy of any Jewish movement or organization. Additionally, my answer, as written, is misleading. It is obvious, I thought, that any neighbor of the Jewish people should be treated, as the Torah commands us, with respect and compassion. Fundamental to the Jewish faith is the concept that every human being was created in the image of G-d, and our sages instruct us to support the non-Jewish poor along with the poor of our own brethren. The sub-question I chose to address instead is: how should we act in time of war, when our neighbors attack us, using their women, children and religious holy places as shields. I attempted to briefly address some of the ethical issues related to forcing the military to withhold fire from certain people and places, at the unbearable cost of widespread bloodshed (on both sides!)—when one’s own family and nation is mercilessly targeted from those very people and places. Furthermore, some of the words I used in my brief comment were irresponsible, and I look forward to further clarifying them in a future issue. I apologize for any misunderstanding my words created."

"If you help yourself to the benefits of being married when you are single, you're likely to help yourself to the benefits of being single when you're married."

"It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration."

"It has been reported that when Michelson was asked towards the end of his life, why he had devoted such a large fraction of his time, to the measurement of the velocity of light, he replied "it was so much fun"."

"It is... striking that the Michelson laboratory was, properly speaking, cosmic. There, the most artificial physics imaginable was referred to the space of the world. The decimal which they wished to reveal by means of the interferometer, the decimal which is of the order of three-fourths of the wavelength of a vibration of light, was related to the orbital speed of the earth, a speed of the order of eighteen miles per second. The precision of such a question... this attempt to experience the immobility of space in its cosmic significance, ought to set the metaphysicians thinking who study the place of man in the world; if only these metaphysicians would give their attention to the lengthy discursive processes which lead science to build new intuitions."

"Relativity was born of an epistemological shock; it was born of the "failure" of the Michelson experiment. ...Is so little required to "shake" the universe of spatiality? Can a single experiment... annihilate... two or three centuries of rational thought? Yes, a single decimal sufficed, as our poet Henri de Regnier would say, to "make all nature sing." ...The Michelson experiment, at first so particular in character, will form the basis of the most far-reaching generalization."

"Now, the velocity of wave propagation can be seen, without the aid of any mathematical analysis, to depend on the elasticity of the medium and its density; for we can see that if a medium is highly elastic the disturbance would be propagated at a great speed."

"Before entering into these details, however, it may be well to reply to the very natural question: What would be the use of such extreme refinement in the science of measurement? Very briefly and in general terms the answer would be that in this direction the greater part of all future discovery must lie. The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions.As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second—an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet by observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that "our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." It follows that every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery, and this will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for bringing to your notice the various methods and results which form the subject matter of these lectures."

"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

"Paris somehow lends itself to conceptual new ideas. I don't know why it is. There is a certain magic to that city."

"È un modo comodo di vivere quello di credersi grande di una grandezza latente."

"Svevo’s Zeno, with his complicated relationship with psychoanalysis, is an unforgettable embodiment of the situation of the 20th century humans who have been persuaded by ideologies that they should not listen to [the moral compass of] conscience. They may believe they are very modern and sophisticated, but in the end they are not able to impose order on the chaos of consciousness and their lives end up in moral bankruptcy. … Zeno lives in an era of turmoil, and ultimately does not succeed in recovering his conscience. However, he has his opportunities to understand that, notwithstanding what the psychoanalyst tells him, only [the moral compass of] conscience can impose the needed order to what is otherwise a chaotic flow of disconnected pieces of consciousness. These opportunities come when he is confronted with suffering and the world’s injustice, although neither he nor the other main characters in the novel profit of them."

"The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno."

"A novelist who ranks with Proust, Kafka, Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism."

"Zeno is one of the comic masterpieces of the century; as Svevo had previously used Flaubert more intelligently than any Italian before him, here he uses Freud in a way that no Italian has done since."

"You might with advantage take out your map of modern literature and mark on it the name of Italo Svevo…for Svevo and his novel, Confessions of Zeno…will henceforth be on other people's maps, and it is well that the atlases of the enlightened should agree."

"La vita attuale è inquinata alle radici. L'uomo s'è messo al posto degli alberi e delle bestie ed ha inquinata l'aria, ha impedito il libero spazio. Può avvenire di peggio. Il triste e attivo animale potrebbe scoprire e mettere al proprio servizio delle altre forze. V'è una minaccia di questo genere in aria. Ne seguirà una grande chiarezza... nel numero degli uomini. Ogni metro quadrato sarà occupato da un uomo. Chi ci guarirà dalla mancanza di aria e di spazio?"

"È così che a forza di correr dietro a quelle immagini, io le raggiunsi. Ora so di averle inventate. Ma inventare è una creazione, non già una menzogna."

"La vita non è né brutta né bella, ma è originale!"

"Il vino è un grande pericolo specie perché non porta a galla la verità. Tutt'altro che la verità anzi: rivela dell'individuo specialmente la storia passata e dimenticata e non la sua attuale volontà; getta capricciosamente alla luce anche tutte le ideucce con le quali in epoca più o meno recente ci si baloccò e che si è dimenticate."

"Era dispostissimo ad istruirmi, ed anzi annotò di propria mano nel mio libretto tre comandamenti ch'egli riteneva bastassero per far prosperare qualunque ditta: 1. Non occorre saper lavorare, ma chi non sa far lavorare gli altri perisce. 2. Non c'è che un solo grande rimorso, quello di non aver saputo fare il proprio interesse. 3. In affari la teoria è utilissima, ma è adoperabile solo quando l'affare è stato liquidato."

"Nella mente di un giovine di famiglia borghese il concetto di vita umana s'associa a quello della carriera e nella prima gioventù la carriera è quella di Napoleone I."

"Quando si muore si ha ben altro da fare che di pensare alla morte."

"Un'immoralità predicata è più punibile di un'azione immorale. Si arriva all'assassinio per amore o per odio; alla propaganda dell'assassinio solo per malvagità."

"L'amore sano è quello che abbraccia una donna sola e intera, compreso il suo carattere e la sua intelligenza."

"La malattia è una convinzione ed io nacqui con quella convinzione."