Academics From England

"But planned obsolescence is possible only if the rate of technological change is contained."

"The onset of a crisis is usually triggered by a spectacular failure which shakes confidence in fictitious forms of capital."

"Money could not be converted into capital if wage labour did not exist."

"But the net effect of increasing scale, centralization of capital, vertical integration and diversification within the corporate form of enterprise has been to replace the 'invisible hand' of the market by the 'visible hand' of the managers."

"The social relations of capitalism have penetrated slowly into all spheres of life to make wage labour the general condition of existence only in fairly recent times."

"Individual capitalists, in short, necessarily act in such a way as to de-stabilize capitalism."

"Individual capitalists, in short, behave in such a way as to threaten the conditions that permit the reproduction of the capitalist class."

"If, for example, a conspiratorially minded elite is so powerful, has at its fingertips such multiple and delicate instruments with which to fine-tune accumulation, then how can the periodic headlong slides into crisis be explained?"

"Money must exist before it can be turned into capital."

"Technological change can become 'fetishized' as a 'thing in itself', as an exogenous guiding force in the history of capitalism."

"The inner logic that governs the laws of motion of capitalism is cold, ruthless and inexorable, responsive only to the law of value. Yet value is a social relation, a product of a particular historical process. Human beings were organizers, creators and participants in that history. We have, Marx asserts, built a vast social enterprise which dominates us, delimits our freedoms and ultimately visits upon us the worst forms of degradation."

"Massive concentration of financial power, accompanied by the machinations of finance capital, can as easily de-stabilize as stabilize capitalism."

"The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism."

"Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise."

"Capital creates space-time."

"Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital."

"The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be 'equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the worlds population - 2.3 billion people.'"

"The equilibrium between supply and demand is achieved only through a reaction against the upsetting of the equilibrium."

"The capacity to transform itself from the inside makes capitalism a somewhat peculiar beast - chameleon-like, it perpetually changes it colour; snake-like, it periodically sheds its skin."

"It’s important to recognize the class origins of this project, which occurred in the 1970s when the capitalist class was in a great deal of difficulty, workers were well organized and were beginning to push back. Like any ruling class, they needed ruling ideas. So, the ruling ideas were that freedom of the market, privatization, entrepreneurialism of the self, individual liberty and all the rest of it should be the ruling ideas of a new social order, and that was the order that got implemented in the 1980s and 1990s."

"Any sensible person right now would join an organisation."

"The accumulation of capital involves the the expansion of value over time."

"The dominant notion of rationality is a capitalist notion of rationality, that is, whatever is profitable, whatever can be organised in terms of social control of labour-power and control of natural resources."

"Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value."

"The trouble with Thatcherism could be summed up in the words of the Duke of Norfolk when...he offered some reflections on the ‘rhythm’ method of birth control: it doesn't bloody work. ... The trouble is that none of these public services can actually be paid for by private individuals. ... The Government knows this really, and is therefore incapable of living up to its supposed convictions. It has therefore increased public expenditure in most areas, but done so in a mean-spirited way which has resulted in a decline in quality in almost every area of public life. ... They have not been prepared to make the necessary capital outlay to overhaul the railways. Speak to any librarian, museum curator, keeper of an art gallery or of a building in public ownership. Rather than allowing adequate funds to these bodies, the Government has relentlessly refused to increase the money as required. ... Unless we all decide to vote Labour — we the majority who are not committed to Conservatism come what may — we face a future with dud trains, dud libraries, dud museums, dud hospitals, and the poor getting poorer — sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything."

"At the dinner table, the talk turned to politics. It was in the days before the 'Gang of Four' had allied themselves to the Liberal Party [early 1981]. Queen Elizabeth [The Queen Mother]: I dislike this new socialist party of Woy's [sic]. Host: They're called the Social Democrats, ma'am. Queen Elizabeth: Yes. Well, you don't change socialist just by leaving ist off the end. I say, it's a cheat to start something called the Social Party. I liked the old Labour Party. The best thing is a good old Tory government with a strong Labour opposition."

"In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity — or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity — by being opinionated rather than by being learned."

"Queen Elizabeth: I thought the girls . . . you see, they were marooned in Windsor Castle for most of the war, and I was not sure that they were having a very good education and kind Sachie and Osbert [Sitwell] said they would arrange a poetry evening for us. Such an embarrassment. Osbert was wonderful, as you would expect, and Edith, of course, but then we had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem . . . I think it was called "The Desert". And first the girls got the giggles, and then I did and then even the King. Self: "The Desert", ma'am? Are you sure it wasn't called "The Waste Land? Queen Elizabeth: That's it. I'm afraid we all giggled. Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank, and we didn't understand a word. Self: I believe he did once work in a bank."

"No creature, animal or human, emerges with much dignity from Animal Farm and it reminds us that there is no political system in the history of the world that is innocent. I remember conversations about Animal Farm with Orwell's great friend Malcolm Muggeridge who had personally witnessed Stalin's show trials in the Soviet Union. "Yes," he would say when I clumsily likened these to the pigs' behaviour in Animal Farm. "But, you know, I have come to see that Eleanor Roosevelt" — ie the embodiment of western smug liberalism — "did more damage to the world than Hitler and Stalin combined." I thought of those words when I finished my umpteenth reread of Orwell's masterpiece, and realised he would certainly have agreed."

"On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we use the wave theory; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays we think in streams of flying energy quanta or corpuscles."

"We were marching down the street, and we were at the head of the troops. We went on marching, and the troops went off to the left."

"This notion of information being at the heart of life... is not restricted to me. I'm in good company. Sir Paul Nurse, former president of the Royal Society, in his visionary essay in Nature, "Life, Logic and Information", extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying too much about what is going on at the molecular level, we should think of life as being a collection of logic modules... with information flowing between them, and control systems... a sort of engineering approach."

"Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way:"

"How scientists go about their job: and it's a process, it's a question of asking questions, respecting observation, respecting experiment, having tentative explanations and then testing them.... There is a problem sometimes with how we teach science at schools. Because we sometimes teach it as if it has been chiseled in stone."

"Even at the level of the cell, phenomena such as general cellular homeostasis and the maintenance of cell integrity, the generation of spatial and temporal order, inter- and intracellular signalling, cell 'memory' and reproduction are not fully understood. ...This is also true for the levels of organization seen in tissues, organs and organisms, which feature more complex phenomena such as and operation of the immune and s."

"We need to focus more on how information is managed in living systems and how this brings about higher level biological phenomena... more investigation into how living systems gather, process, store and use information, as was emphasized at the birth of ."

"DNA can act as a digital information storage device that can be precisely copied. Similarly, the mechanism of the lac operon... can be described in terms of molecular interactions between DNA, protein and s. But these interactions make sense only when they are translated into a negative loop..."

"We need to describe the molecular interactions and biochemical transformations that take place in living organisms, and then translate these descriptions into the logic circuits that reveal how information is managed. This analysis should not be confined to the flow of information from to , but should also be applied to all functions operating in cells and organisms, including chemical interactions and transformations as well as physical phenomena, such as electrical signalling and mechanical processes."

"Research is a matter of overcoming obstacles. That's what research is about. There are problems. There are difficulties. It's hard to make sense of a collection of information or whatever. Obstacles are the nature of research. Maybe that's why some people give up. There's always an obstacle. You overcome one to find there's another one."

"Sometimes one can improve the theories in the sense of discovering a quicker, more efficient way of doing a given calculation."

"Grattan-Guinness has achieved a synthesis here of remarkable historical and mathematical scope and sensitivity. His book is a 'must read' for historians of science and mathematics, as well as mathematicians."

"Grattan-Guiness's uniformly interesting and valuable account of the interwoven development of logic and related fields of mathematics . . . between 1870 and 1940 presents a significantly revised analysis of the history of the period. . . . [His] book is important because it supplies what has been lacking: a full account of the period from a primary mathematical perspective."

"The great historian of logic and mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness passed away about a month ago, aged 73. ... Ivor's work and scholarship spans over an impressive range of topics and areas, and is bound to continue to influence many generations of scholars to come. It is a great loss."

"In addition, the teaching of theories from axioms, or some close imitation of them such as the basic laws of an algebra, is usually an educational disaster."

"The teaching of axioms should come after conveying the theory in a looser version."

"Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure to all but a few specialists."

"It [ non-Euclidean geometry ] would be ranked among the most famous achievements of the entire [nineteenth] century, but up to 1860 the interest was rather slight."

"Non-Newtonian calculi... have considerable potential as alternative approaches to traditional problems."

"From the 3rd century onwards, orthodox Christianity, based on a Hebrew story and worshipping the Jew Jesus, also led many campaigns of anti-Semitism."

"Operations research has many precursors and allied fields, including Taylorism (after Frederick W. Taylor), scientific management and management science, industrial engineering and systems analysis. As one early textbook explained, the roots of OR "are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940" (Churchman et al. 1957: 3). Certainly its practitioners have expended much energy and ink in search of an acceptable definition of OR. Morse tried unsuccessfully to halt the debate by declaring OR to be 'the activity carried on by members of the Operations Research Society' (Morse 1953: 159) But his colleagues were not so easily dissuaded from debate. Much of the concern with definition focused on the sometimes elusive distinctions between OR and neighbouring fields; the attempt to define, or redefine, OR was also born of the desire to allow the subject to evolve beyond the orthodoxy of wartime experience. Crucial considerations included the balance between model and application, and the complexity of the mathematics involved."