People From Stockholm

"Eratosthenes... knew that the Sun was straight overhead in... Syene at noon on the summer solstice, but that it was 7.2 degrees south of straight overhead in , located 794 kilometers farther north. He concluded... 794 kilometers corresponded to 7.2 degrees out of the 360 degrees... around Earth's circumference, so that the circumference must be... 39,700 km..."

"There's no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible..."

"[W]e've repeatedly underestimated not only the size of our cosmos, but also the power of our human mind to understand it."

"We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us. ...[M]y main responsibility as a teacher isn't to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions."

"So this book... [is] my personal quest for the ultimate nature of reality."

"[W]hat I had been missing... and what Feynman realized: physics is the ultimate intellectual adventure, the quest to understand the deepest mysteries of our Universe. ...[I]t makes us see more clearly, adding to the beauty and wonder of the world ...[T]he lens of physics adds more beauty to the world ..."

"I... ended up at the , focusing on environmental issues. I wanted to... make our planet a better place, and felt that the main problem... [was] that we didn't properly use... technology... I... was intrigued by... creating economic incentives that aligned... egoism with the common good. ...I soon grew disillusioned, concluding that economics was... intellectual prostitution... rewarded for saying what the powers that be wanted to hear. ...[T]he book that changed everything: ' ...[W]hat did Feynman see that I missed in high school? ...I sat down with... '... and started reading, "If... all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed... " ...I read on ...I felt like I was having a religious experience I finally got it!"

"Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums... On astronomically large scales... weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes... put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes."

"I'd hate the sound of thirty thousand people booing."

"I don't get it... did we look like transvestites or something?"

"I våldets Sverige så får hederliga medborgare flytta åt sidan. I rädsla för att vara nästa som drabbas av våldsverkaren, med vapen i hand, med drogögon mitt i ansiktet, så vet vi inte vad den här personen är kapabel att göra"

"Ska vi vara ärliga så är en hel del av jobbproblematiken kopplad till utrikes födda."

"We have a strong economy but we don't have the job creation we need. We want more job creation."

"The Nordic welfare model is in many aspects a good model but it needs more of a choice for individuals."

"Om alla liknar Carl bekräftas vanföreställningarna av moderaterna. Det blir ett parti för Carl Bildt-kopior."

"Ursvenskt är bara barbariet. Resten av utvecklingen har kommit utifrån. [...] Det kan ibland vara bra att ödmjukt påminna om att väldigt mycket av det som är Sverige har skapats i utveckling, just för att vi varit öppna för att ta emot andra människor och andra erfarenheter"

"As a result of this continuous improvement of productivity through the division of labor and technical advancement, one hour's labor today is worth about 25 times more than it was in the mid-19th century [....] Growth and productivity alone are capable of raising real wages in the long run."

"Is the problem here lack of access to clean water? No. Is it starvation? No. Is it laziness? Definitely not. No, it's poverty due to lack of growth, due to lack of reform. Everything else is just a symptom of that. In fact, even the biggest horrors - famine and war - have political causes. No democracy has ever been afflicted by a famine, and no two democracies have ever made war on each other. Africa has been subjected by socialism, gangster rule and protectionism. Africa has not been too globalized; it has been too marginalized."

"Now it happens to have been the Social Democrats who have regimented the important institutions in society, but it would have been dangerous whichever party it had been. Development and diversity depend on independent initiatives and competition. When everyone thinks alike not much gets thought."

"Basically, what I believe in is neither capitalism nor globalization... I believe in man's capacity for achieving great things and in the combined force resulting from encounters and exchanges. I plead for greater liberty and a more open world... because it provides a setting which liberates individuals and their creativity as no other system can. It spurs the dynamism which has led to human, economic, scientific, and technical advances, and which will continue to do so. Believing in capitalism does not mean believing in growth, the economy, or efficiency. Desirable as these may be, these are only the results. Belief in capitalism is, fundamentally, belief in mankind."

"My aim is freedom and voluntary relations in all fields. The market economy is the result of this in the economic realm; in the cultural realm it means freedom of expression; in politics, democracy and the rule of law; in social life, the right to live according to one's own values and to choose one's company."

"Since 1965 [....] the richest fifth of the world's population increased its average income by 75 percent. For the poorest fifth of the world's population, the increase has been faster still, with average incomes more than doubling during the same period."

"In the affluent world we have had capitalism in one form or another for a couple of centuries. That is how countries of the West became "the affluent world." Capitalism has given people both the liberty and the incentive to create, produce, and trade, thereby generating preosperity."

"I think my life has been wonderful. I have done what I felt like. I was given courage and I was given adventure and that has carried me along. And then also a sense of humor and a little bit of common sense. It has been a very rich life."

"Before anything else, she is an actress. I believe that any great artist is an artist first. For example, my father was an artist before he was a husband and a father. Yes, I must say it. Ingrid is that way, too. But she also has many admirable qualities as a woman. She is so honest that she will always prefer a scandal to a lie. If she's at a party and people are talking about a writer who is unknown to her, she'll come out flatly and say, "I haven't read him." But at the same time, she understands more than many people who pretend to be knowledgeable. While she admits her limitations, she has great instinct and understanding."

"What is happiness? It depends on two assets, which fortunately I have. They are good health and a short memory."

"It's not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying."

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."

"I've never sought success in order to get fame and money; it's the talent and the passion that count in success."

"I have no regrets. I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say."

"For me, Ingrid is a wonderful mother and Roberto, a wonderful father. You should see them with their children. There was nothing intellectual about it. They were like animals with their young, so tactile and sensual. The joy of touching the baby's skin! They were always rolling around on the floor with the twins and the little boy. Once, I remember watching Ingrid doing that, and I thought to myself, "This is just like a mother dog with her puppies.""

"Except physically, we know little more about Garbo than we know about Shakespeare."

"I think an artist who abandons his art is the saddest thing in the world, sadder than death. There must have been something about Garbo's film career that profoundly revolted her."

"I never said, "I want to be alone." I only said, "I want to be let alone! There is all the difference."

"I am bewildered by the thousands of strange people who write me letters. They do not know me. Why do they do that?"

"I t'ank I go home."

"The mystery surrounding Garbo was as thick as a London fog."

"Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced."

"Today this young woman —The Garbo as she is known — is the most glamorous figure in the whole world; there is no one with a more magnetic, romantic or exotic personality, there never has been a film star with so wide an appeal... Greta Garbo is Queen of Hollywood, her salary is fabulous, her word law. She has pointed features in a round face, her mouth is wide and knife-like. Her teeth are large and square and like evenly matched pearls; her eyes are pale, with lashes so long that when she lowers her lids they strike her cheeks; her complexion is of an unearthly whiteness and so delicate that she looks to have one layer of skin less than other people, and the suspicion of a frown is sooner perceptible."

"Every man's harmless fantasy mistress. By being worshiped by the entire world she gave you the feeling that if your imagination had to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste."

"Her instinct, her mastery over the machine, was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyze this woman's acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera."

"Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality. The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive."

"We knew each other. We talked. We passed each other going to the set of our own films. We were doing our jobs. We had great mutual respect."

"You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain. You're the National Gallery; you're Garbo's Salary; you're cellophane!"

"She is the most miraculous blend of personality and sheer dramatic talent that the screen has ever known and her presence in The Painted Veil immediately makes it one of the season's cinema events."

"What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober."

"Roughneck and rudeness, We should be using, On the ones who practice wicked charms, For the sword and the stone, Bad to the bone, Battle’s not over, Even when it's won, And when a child is born into this world, It has no concept, Of the tone the skin is living in."

"The bourgeoisie seemed to live in the illusion that an effort for peace presupposed an almost unreserved support for the American position. The hallmark of a balanced bourgeois critique seems to be that it should be heard as little as possible. Preferably be almost silent. That it is surrounded by so many reservations that it loses every meaning and that it is guaranteed not to affect any business."

"For us, democracy is a question of human dignity. This includes the political liberties, the right to freely express our views, the right to criticize and to influence opinion. It embraces the right to health and work, to education and social security."

"Former Prime minister Tage Erlander spoke on radio a year ago about the people's home and about how he visited his senile mother at a residential hospital outside of Karlstad. When he came to visit her she told him; I'm so happy here. Everyone is so nice to me and I get good care and nice food. But who is paying for all this? Is it you Tage? And Erlander said; no I'm not paying, you're paying for this yourself mother. You have paid for this your entire life. You have grown up in this society, you have taken care of the family all these years, you have been a good citizen. And you have the right to be taken care of when you get old and infirm, not because of charity, not because you have a thick wallet, but because you are a Swedish citizen. This is your society, our society. You have the same right to this as anyone else. That is the welfare state and it is our greatest pride!"