Quantitative Thinking Quotes

There is coming an era for people with a mathematical state of mind

What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.

Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can 55 elephants drink?

I bathe in statistics.

I've never really understood the desire people have to quantify a baby. "He's X big and Y long," As if the baby is a fish you're not sure you're going to keep. Or some prize potato you're hoping will win a prize at the county fair.

Over the years, I've learned a lot about nutrition and about myself, so it's a lot more based on feel. I stopped putting a number on it because people were analyzing it too much.

We're in a world that is run by accountants and I think that it's sad in many ways.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.

Everybody's got the mindset that everything should be measurable.

It seems to me, that if statesmen had a little more arithmetic, or were accustomed to calculation, wars would be much less frequent.

The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.