University Of Oxford Alumni

"Christian life meant a separation from the standards of that world: you couldn't be a Baal-worshipper, you couldn't sacrifice to idols, be a sodomite, practice infanticide, compatibly with the Christian allegiance. That is not to say that Christians were good; we humans are a bad lot and our lives as Christians even if not blackly and grossly wicked are usually very mediocre."

"Intention appears to be something that we can express, but which brutes (which e.g. do not give orders) can have, though lacking any distinct expression of intention. For a cat's movements in stalking a bird are hardly to be called an expression of intention. One might as well call a car's stalling the expression of its being about to stop. Intention is unlike emotion in this respect, that the expression of it is purely conventional; we might say 'linguistic', if we will allow certain bodily movements with a conventional meaning to be included in language."

"But what has made this problem special for amateurs is that there's a tiny possibility that there does exist an elegant 17th-century proof."

"Originally the Kolyvagin-Flach method only worked under particularly constrained circumstances, but Wiles believed he had adapted and strengthened it sufficiently to work for all his needs. According to Katz this was not necessarily the case, and the effects were dramatic and devastating. The error did not necessarily mean that Wiles's work was beyond salvation, but it did mean that he would have to strengthen his proof. The absolutism of mathematics demanded that Wiles demonstrate beyond all doubt that his method worked for every element of every E-series and M-series."

"Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—and couldn't exist without—the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them."

"I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine."

"I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream."

"Always try the problem that matters most to you."

"However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it."

"Certainly one thing that I've learned is that it is important to pick a problem based on how much you care about it."

"But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention."

"I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future."

"Fermat was my childhood passion."

"I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof."

"Fermat couldn't possibly have had this proof."

"Young children simply aren't interested in Fermat. They just want to hear a story and they're not going to let you do anything else."

"I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal."

"I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest."

"Here was a problem, that I, a ten year old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it."

"But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem -- Fermat's Last Theorem."

"I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own."

"I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days."

"I think I'll stop here."

"When a body of twenty or two thousand or two hundred thousand men bind themselves together to act in a particular way for some common purpose, they create a body which, by no fiction of law but from the very nature of things, differs from the individuals of whom it is constituted."

"[I]t was A.V. Dicey whose writing – above all his classic textbook The Law of the Constitution – had most impact on me. It had long been fashionable to attack Dicey for his doctrinaire opposition to the new administrative state, and there are plenty of learned commentators still inclined to do so. But I found myself immediately at home with what he said – it is not perhaps without significance that though Dicey's was a great legal mind, he was at heart a classical liberal. The "law of the constitution" was, in Dicey's words, the result of two "guiding principles, which had been gradually worked out by the more or less conscious efforts of generations of English statesmen and lawyers". The first of these principles was the sovereignty of Parliament. The second was the rule of law, which I will summarize briefly and inadequately as the principle that no authority is above the law of the land. For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through reading Hayek's masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think of this principle as having wider application."

"Dicey's intellectual and critical powers were accompanied by a lovable simplicity of character and a lively wit. "It is better to be flippant than dull" he used to tell his pupils, and it was the force of his epigrams that made his early reputation as a speaker in the Oxford Union. His remarkable faculty of exposition, acquired by persistent revision of his compositions, was sometimes marred by a tendency to redundancy of which he could not rid himself."

"Lectures on the relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century was published in 1905 and was received as a notable contribution to political philosophy—"the esprit des lois of our times"."

"His Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, originally published in 1885, was at once recognized to be no mere technical discussion but a literary contribution to the analysis and interpretation of the fundamental ideas which underlie the political thought and life of the nation."

"Dicey will hold, in the history of the legal literature of the nineteenth century, a place not unlike that which Blackstone holds in the legal literature of the eighteenth century; for both have written books which became classics whilst they were still alive... Dicey's book [Law of the Constitution] is a classic, because he added to his knowledge of English law a knowledge both of the constitutional law of other states, and a knowledge of English history."

"[Dicey's The Law of Domicil] not only reduced to order one of the most intricate and technical branches of law...but exerted a potent influence on its development."

"Macaulay, Mill and Burke are I believe the three authors to whom as far as I can judge I owe more than to any other teachers I could mention."

"A story told of that eminent man and very learned judge, Mr. Justice Willes, and related by an ear-witness, is to the following effect:—Mr. Justice Willes was asked: "If I look into my drawing-room, and see a burglar packing up the clock, and he cannot see me, what ought I to do?" Willes replied, as nearly as may be: "My advice to you, which I give as a man, as a lawyer, and as an English judge, is as follows: In the supposed circumstance this is what you have a right to do, and I am by no means sure that it is not your duty to do it. Take a double-barrelled gun, carefully load both barrels, and then, without attracting the burglar's attention, aim steadily at his heart and shoot him dead.""

"Acts therefore which would not be justifiable in protection of a person's own property, may often be justified as the necessary means, either of stopping the commission of a crime, or of arresting a felon. Burglars rob A’s house, they are escaping over his garden wall, carrying off A’s jewels with them. A is in no peril of his life, but he pursues the gang, calls upon them to surrender, and having no other means of preventing their escape, knocks down one of them, X, who dies of the blow; A, it would seem, if Foster's authority may be trusted, not only is innocent of guilt, but has also discharged a public duty."

"All that necessarily results from an analysis of our institutions, and a comparison of them with the institutions of foreign countries, is, that the English constitution is still marked, far more deeply than is generally supposed, by peculiar features, and that these peculiar characteristics may be summed up in the combination of Parliamentary Sovereignty with the Rule of Law."

"The fact that the most arbitrary powers of the English executive must always be exercised under Act of Parliament places the government, even when armed with the widest authority, under the supervision, so to speak, of the Courts. Powers, however extraordinary, which are conferred or sanctioned by statute, are never really unlimited, for they are confined by the words of the Act itself, and, what is more, by the interpretation put upon the statute by the judges. Parliament is supreme legislator, but from the moment Parliament has uttered its will as lawgiver, that will becomes subject to the interpretation put upon it by the judges of the land."

"Our constitution, in short, is a judge-made constitution, and it bears on its face all the features, good and bad, of judge-made law."

"Modern Englishmen may at first feel some surprise that the "rule of law" (in the sense in which we are now using the term) should be considered as in any way a peculiarity of English institutions, since, at the present day, it may seem to be not so much the property of any one nation as a trait common to every civilised and orderly state. Yet, even if we confine our observation to the existing condition of Europe, we shall soon be convinced that the "rule of law" even in this narrow sense is peculiar to England, or to those countries which, like the United States of America, have inherited English traditions. In almost every continental community the executive exercises far wider discretionary authority in the matter of arrest, of temporary imprisonment, of expulsion from its territory, and the like, than is either legally claimed or in fact exerted by the government in England; and a study of European politics now and again reminds English readers that wherever there is discretion there is room for arbitrariness, and that in a republic no less than under a monarchy discretionary authority on the part of the government must mean insecurity for legal freedom on the part of its subjects."

"Foreign observers of English manners, such for example as Voltaire, De Lolme, Tocqueville, or Gneist, have been far more struck than have Englishmen themselves with the fact that England is a country governed, as is scarcely any other part of Europe, under the rule of law."

"The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament."

"The rule of law, as described in this treatise, remains to this day a distinctive characteristic of the English constitution. In England no man can be made to suffer punishment or to pay damages for any conduct not definitely forbidden by law; every man's legal rights or liabilities are almost invariably determined by the ordinary Courts of the realm, and each man's individual rights are far less the result of our constitution than the basis on which that constitution is founded."

"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter!—all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"

"Erected by the King and Parliament As a Testimony to The Virtues and Ability of WILLIAM PITT EARL OF CHATHAM During whose Administration In the Reigns of George II and George III Divine Providence Exalted Great Britain To an Height of Prosperity and Glory Unknown to any Former Age Born November 15, 1708; Died May 11, 1778"

"Our toast in general is,—Magna Charta, the British Constitution,—PITT and Liberty forever!"

"That the thanks of...the City of York...be presented to the Right Honourable William Pitt, for the signal advantages this nation has derived from his upright, wise, and vigorous administration; to which, under Providence, we owe the revival of the ancient British spirit, the acquisition of the most valuable and important conquests, and the abolition of party distinctions. The loss of so able, so disinterested a Statesman, who so happily united the characters of the great Minister and the true Patriot, cannot but be deeply regretted at this critical conjuncture by every well-wisher to his King and Country."

"[W]e sensibly felt the manifold good effects of your truly patriot and singularly wise and upright administration. To this we must attribute the rescuing Britain from the shameful infection of that pestilential, ministerial panic, which called foreign mercenaries to the defence of a Country, by her native force, when properly exerted, more than a match for half the powers of Europe. To your steady virtues, we stand indebted for freeing our Mother Country from the reproach of calling foreign troops to defend her from a threatened invasion, and for chastising the insolence of the vaunting invader, by inspiring the councils and arms of Britain with that ancient true National spirit, which, when duly exerted, ever has, and ever must render the British name terrible to her foes in the utmost extremities of the globe."

"When Pitt left office the Pope of Rome said that he esteemed it the highest honour to be born an Englishman. In Africa we had taken away all the French possessed; in Europe our troops had beaten the flower of their armies, while our expeditions had insulted their coasts from Dunkirk to Bordeaux and had even occupied a parcel of France; on the high seas our fleets were supreme. In America we had won a continent, in India we were masters of Bengal, and in other parts had no European rivals left—victories which ensured that in these two vast portions of the world the Protestant Anglo-Saxon—not the French Roman Catholic—civilisation should thereafter prevail. And in spite of the long war the commerce on which England's greatness then chiefly rested had never been so flourishing. To Pitt all this was due."

"The admirers of Mr Pitt extol the reverberation he gave to our councils, the despondence he banished, the spirit he infused, the conquests he made, the security he affixed to our trade and plantations, the humiliation of France, the glory of Britain carried under his administration to a pitch at which it never had arrived—and all this is exactly true."

"Mr Pitt, on entering upon administration, had found the nation at the lowest ebb in point of power and reputation. His predecessors, now his coadjutors, wanted genius, spirit and system... France, who meant to be feared, was feared heartily... They were willing to trust that France would be so good as to ruin us by inches. Pitt had roused us from this ignoble lethargy."

"Mr. Pitt has the finest Genius, improv'd by Study, and all the ornamental Part of Classical Learning. He came early into the House of Commons, where he soon distinguish'd himself; lost a Cornecy of Horse, which was then his only subsistence; and in about twenty years, has raised himself to be first Minister, and the most powerful Subject in this Country. His Eloquence is nervous, natural, correct, and elegant. He has an astonishing Clearness, and Facility of Expression, and has an Eye as significant as his Words. He is not always a fair or conclusive Reasoner, but commands the Passions with Sovereign Authority; and to inflame or captivate a popular Assembly, is a consummate Orator. Tho his Passions are strong, and fiery, they are all obedient to his unbounded Ambition. He has courage of every sort, cool or impetuous, active or deliberate... [E]ven his Enemies must allow that he has the Firmness, and activity of a great Minister: that he has hitherto conducted the War with Spirit, Vigor, and tolerable Success: and tho some favorite Schemes have been visionary and impracticable, they have at least been more honorable, & less dangerous, than the passive, unperforming Pusillanimity, of the late Administration."

"When all due allowance is made for Pitt's shortcomings, however, and credit given to others where it is due, the fact remains that he was a great war minister. His theatrical posturings and belligerent rhetoric were exactly what the country needed, a vision of itself greater than that projected by his predecessors as prime minister, the pacific Walpole, the able but self-effacing Pelham, the timid and neurotic Newcastle... In the last analysis Pitt's greatness can only be measured against the rival alternatives, and here he was a giant among pygmies."