People From Cambridge

"There is little point in demanding minor concessions and relaxations of the abstract, timeless general equilibrium. The light it can throw on human affairs is throw by its most austere and formal version. We are not concerned to ask: How could it possibly work? The useful question is: What does its logical structure imply?"

"When we examine this suggestion, we see that it is no more than a formal acknowledgement of a problem, the problem of how (by what institutional arrangement, by what organization of affairs) the equilibrium prices are to be discovered. Repeated trial and error, while the market stands in suspense awaiting the outcome, is not a practical resort. The number of distinct trials, even if confined to discrete steps of price and quantity, would be so immense that the necessary 'market day' would extend beyond human life-times... [The] theoretical ideal applies to mutually isolated days or moments, each to be treated as perfectly self-contained and looking to no yesterday and no tomorrow. But the real market is dealing with goods inherited from yesterday, and in means of production whose products will not be ready till tomorrow. Meanwhile the non-economic circumstances are changing and rendering each successive equilibrium obsolete."

"A discipline, a region of the world of thought, should seek to know itself. Like an individual human being, it has received from its origins a stamp of character, a native mode of response to the situations confronting it. Right responses, 'responsibility', will require of the profession as of the individual an insight into the powers and defects of the tool which history has bequeathed to it."

"I am a polyartist."

"All form is a process of notation."

"If you haven't done it twice, you haven't done it."

"What truly remains of me Is that very thing- my absence."

"I never feel quite complete unless I'm doing all the arts-visual,musical,literary."

"I guess that's why I developed the form 'intermedia'.You are always focussing on all kinds of media to express yourself."

"Happenings are a fusion of visual art , music and theatre."

"Concrete poetry is a fusion of visual art and poetry."

"Sound poetry is a fusion of music and literature."

"The first problem I propose to tackle is this: how much of its income should a nation save? To answer this a simple rule is obtained valid under conditions of surprising generality; the rule, which will be further elucidated later, runs as follows. The rate of saving multiplied by the marginal utility of money should always be equal to the amount by which the total net rate of enjoyment of utility falls short of the maximum possible rate of enjoyment."

"Ramsey... had a most uncommon power of explaining clearly to others what he thought and why... But sometimes... he fails to explain things as clearly... simply because... he does not realize that what to him seems perfectly clear and straightforward may to others, less gifted, offer many puzzles. ...But even where you cannot understand him completely you can often understand him enough to find him extraordinarily interesting. ...even if he was wrong, [he] had very good reasons for the opinions at which he had arrived."

"He was an extraordinarily clear thinker: no-one could avoid more easily... the sort of confusions of thought to which even the best philosophers are liable, and he was capable of apprehending clearly... the subtlest distinctions. He had... an exceptional power of drawing conclusions from a complicated set of facts. ...his subtlety and ingenuity did not lead him, as it seems to have led some philosophers, to deny obvious facts. ...he could see which problems were the most fundamental, and it was these... which he was most anxious to solve. ...I almost always felt, with regard to any subject which we discussed, that he understood it much better than I did."

"With Ramsey’s young death, the world of learning was robbed of one of its most glittering stars. It is now time that he receive his due. What is needed is a thorough biography that would describe and place in intellectual history his important contributions to economics, mathematics, and philosophy, while keeping an eye out for what Virginia Woolf called the “fertile facts” that would reveal to us not only the impressive mind, but also the somewhat elusive personality of this extraordinary man."

"The loss of Ramsey is... to his friends, for whom his personal qualities joined most harmoniously with his intellectual powers, one which it will take them long to forget. His bulky Johnsonian frame, his spontaneous gurgling laugh, the simplicity of his feelings and reactions... his honesty of mind and heart, his modesty, and the amazing, easy efficiency of the intellectual machine which ground away behind his wide temples and broad smiling face, have been taken from us at the height of their excellence and before their harvest of work and life could be gathered in."

"When he did descend from his accustomed stony heights, he still lived without effort in a rarer atmosphere than most economists care to breathe, and handled the technical apparatus of our science with the easy grace of someone accustomed to something far more difficult. But he has left behind him in print only two witnesses to his power - his papers published in The Economic Journal on 'A contribution to the Theory of Taxation' in March, 1927, and on 'A Mathematical Theory of Saving' in December, 1928. The latter of these is, I think, one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made, both in respect of the intrinsic importance and difficulty of its subject, the power and elegance of the technical methods employed, and the clear purity of the illumination with which the writer's mind is felt by the reader to play about its subject. The article is terribly difficult reading for an economist, but it is not difficult to appreciate how scientific and aesthetic qualities are combined in it together."

"The death... is a heavy loss—though his primary interests were in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic—to the pure theory of economics. ...If he had followed the easier path of mere inclination, I am not sure that he would not have exchanged the tormenting exercises of the foundations of thought, where the mind tries to catch its own tail, for the delightful paths of our own most agreeable branch of the moral sciences, in which theory and fact, intuitive imagination and practical judgement, are blended in a manner comfortable to the human intellect."

"[M]y teacher Frank Ramsey... showed that if a scientific system was so completely precise that you could replace every word in it, such as "electrons," by the totality of all observations on the electron, then you could never discover anything new. ...Ramsey's theorem is really equivalent to all the Tarski-Turing theorems in essence because it says that if you push the symbolism even in a word like "mass" so that you say, as operationalists do... mass is everything you do when you weigh the mass, you are never going to discover that mass and energy are interchangeable. You have closed the system to new discoveries."

"But what we can't say we can't say, and we can't whistle it either."

"[A]lthough my attempted reconstruction of the view of Whitehead and Russell overcomes, I think, many of the difficulties, it is impossible to regard it as altogether satisfactory."

"The assimilation of tautologies and contradictions with true and false propositions respectively results from the fact that tautologies and contradictions can be taken as truth-functions just like ordinary propositions, and for determining the truth of falsity of the truth-function, tautologies and contradictions among its arguments must be counted as true or false respectively. ...Are the propositions of symbolic logic and mathematics tautologies in Mr Wittgenstein's sense?"

"Tautologies and contradictions are not real propositions, but degenerate cases. ...Clearly, by negating a contradiction we get a tautology, and by negating a tautology a contradiction. ...A genuine proposition asserts something about reality, and it is true if reality is as it is asserted to be. But a tautology is a symbol constructed so as to say nothing whatever about reality, but to express total ignorance by agreeing with every possibility."

"The formalists neglected the content altogether and made mathematics meaningless, the logicians neglected the form and made mathematics consist of any true generalizations; only by taking account of both sides and regarding it as composed of tautologous generalizations can we obtain an adequate theory."

"[T]he formalist school, of whom the most eminent representative is Hilbert, have concentrated on the propositions of mathematics, such as '2 + 2 = 4'. They have pronounced these to be meaningless formulae to be manipulated according to arbitrary rules, and they hold that mathematical knowledge consists in knowing what formulae can be derived from what others consistently with the rules. ...for example...'2' is a meaningless mark occurring in these meaningless formulae. But... '2' occurs not only in '2 + 2 = 4', but also in 'It is 2 miles to the station', which is not a meaningless formulae, but a significant proposition, in which '2' cannot conceivably be a meaningless mark."

"[W]e shall be concerned with the general nature of pure mathematics, and how it is distinguished from other sciences. Here there are... two distinct categories of things of which an account must be given—the ideas or concepts of mathematics, and the propositions of mathematics. ...the great majority of writers on the subject have concentrated their attention on the explanation of one or the other... and erroneously supposed that a satisfactory explanation of the other would immediately follow."

"The object of this paper is to give a satisfactory account of the Foundations of Mathematics in accordance with the general method of Frege, Whitehead and Russell. Following these authorities, I hold that mathematics is part of logic, and so belong to what may be called the logical school as opposed to the formalist and intuitionist schools. I have therefore taken Principia Mathematica as a basis for discussion and ammendment; and believe myself to have discovered how, by using the work of Mr Ludwig Wittgenstein, it can be rendered free from the serious objections which have caused its rejection by the majority of German authorities, who have deserted altogether its line of approach."

"Philosophy must be of some use and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions. Or else it is a disposition that we have to check, and an inquiry to see that this is so; i.e. the chief proposition of philosophy is that philosophy is nonsense. And again we must then take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense!"

"It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how far our conclusions are affected by considerations which our simplifying assumptions have forced us to neglect."

"I can assure the Right Honorable Gentleman that in this house I see myself as a colossal god-king, a powerful beast from another realm, blessed with the powers of destruction, and I will run through the Palace of Westminster, lashing at all I encounter with the metal prong-whips. And all shall perish."

"Under David Cameron, we have this situation where you now need more qualifications to work as a shift manager at McDonald's than to become a teacher."

"We looked o'er London, where men wither and choke, Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies, And lore of woods and wild wind prophecies, Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke."

"Theodore Watts, as he told me twenty years ago, holds the opinion that Shakespeare wrote private poetry in a separate book while composing his dramas, and that he gave such portions of it as he could make fit, to certain of his characters. He thought, if I remember aright that the soliloquy and the dagger-scence were morsels of this sort. It certainly must strike one that the "the law's delay" and "the insolence of office" were not prominent grievances in Hamlet's career."

"Man's knowledge, save before his fellow man, Is ignorance—his widest wisdom folly."

"When hope lies dead—ah, when 'tis death to live, And wrongs remembered make the heart still bleed, Better are Sleep's kind lies for Life's blind need Than truth, if lies a little peace can give."

"Yon silvery billows breaking on the beach Fall back in foam beneath the star-shine clear, The while my rhymes are murmuring in your ear A restless lore like that the billows teach; For on these sonnet-waves my soul would reach From its own depths, and rest within you, dear, As, through the billowy voices yearning here Great nature strives to find a human speech.A sonnet is a wave of melody: From heaving waters of the impassion'd soul A billow of tidal music one and whole Flows in the "octave"; then, returning free, Its ebbing surges in the "sestet" roll Back to the deeps of Life's tumultuous sea."

"A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying."

"If ever a man came out fighting, Leavis did: this, to many of us is one of his major virtues, because of the importance of the things he was fighting for. With others, he was working to make English grow to its place as a central subject in a contemporary humane education, with the emphasis on criticism and on cultural history rather than on academicism and the vagaries of 'taste'. He was as uncompromising as he was urgent and as angry as he was determined."

"He is a critic of great gifts, insight and integrity; but those who are not entirely for him are wholly against him; he seeks not pupils but "disciples"; those disciples he has attracted who have not broken away have been, like the master, rancid and fanatic in manner."

"A powerful critical talent who destroyed his own sense of proportion, Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of meningitis. His career was the clearest possible proof that the course the arts take is not under the control of criticism."

"The very prevalence of what one might call the ‘outsider than thou’ attitude among intellectuals indicates that there is a form of competition for a perceived cultural good at work here. Whether it is the Cambridge don and influential critic F R. Leavis describing himself as an ‘outlaw’, or the old Etonian and widely published author and journalist George Orwell casting himself as a ‘literary pariah’, or the well-connected, well-heeled, well-reviewed novelist Virginia Woolf aspiring to found a ‘Society of Outsiders’ (or, more recently, the tenured professors-cum-media stars trying to lay claim to the prestige of the ‘exile’), the very repetitiveness of the claims tells us that what we are dealing with here is a symptom of the logic of being an intellectual, not an objective description of a social or cultural location. As a self-ascribed status, outsiderdom is an empowering identity, an attempt to use the available media to address the relevant publics without, so the claim goes, succumbing to the seductions and self-deceptions of insiderdom."

"The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy."

"He doesn't know what he means, and doesn't know he doesn't know."

"Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be."

"It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life."

"The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact – that is, never to say anything. I still, however think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary)."

"This is a terrific outburst. And since it doesn’t have a tail right now, some observers have confused it with a nova. We’ve had at least two reports of a new star."

"When the Deep Impact probe hit Comet 9P/Tempel, there was almost no change in brightness. … This outburst by Comet Holmes is extreme!"

"It is probably a good idea to search, at some level, for asteroids that come to the Earth's general vicinity. But merely counting the asteroids found is not sufficient. It is desirable to follow up each discovery to examine whether it can or can not be a threat during the next century or so. Objects for which the threat cannot be eliminated should be singled out for special study, notably to the extent of searching for old images in photographic archives. 1997 XF11 was noteworthy for the apathy shown to it prior to the very widespead announcement in March. If proper attention had been given to it earlier, the circumstances that led to the announcement would never have occurred. Sometimes statistics will conspire to draw attention to a problem. Maybe they are trying to tell us something."