Elephants Meaningful Quotes

Progressives are constantly giving lists of facts. Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance.

Yeah, yeah, you have the memory of an elephant. Or you’re so smart that you remember everything, right? WRONG. Not writing down your thoughts, ideas, tasks, etc, is stupid. Why? Because you’re wasting a lot of brain power when you rely on your memory. When you write everything down, you can use your brainpower for other things. Like solving problems. That’s actually useful and advances your career.

Now be honest-wouldn't you have expected e^i*pi to be (a) gibberish aling the lines of "elephant inkpie," or, if it were mathematically meaningful, to be (b) an infinitely complicated irrational number? Indeed, e^i*pi is a transcendental number raised to an imaginary transcendental power. And if (b) were the case, surely e^i*pi would not compute no matter how much computer power were available to try to pin down its value. As you know, neither (a) nor (b) is true, because e^i*pi = -1. (I suspect the fact that both (a) and (b) are provably false is the reason that Benjamin Peirce, the nineteenth-century mathematician, found Euler's formula (or a closely rekated formula) "absolutely paradoxical.") In other words, when the three enigmatic numbers are combined in this form, e^i*pi , they react together to carve out a wormhole that spirals through the infinite depths of number space to emerge smack dab in the heartland of integers. It's as if greenish-pink androids rocketing toward Alpha Centauri in 2370 had hit a space time anomaly and suddenly found themselves sitting in a burger joint in Topeka, Kansas, in 1956. Elvis, of course , was playing on the jukebox.

The runaway accumulation of wealth for the rich and the runaway loss of wealth for others mean for most people a runaway loss of experiences of personal value—the loss of a meaningful life.

Facts matter enormously, but to be meaningful they must be framed in terms of their moral importance. Remember, you can only understand what the frames in your brain allow you to understand. If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled.

Ubuntu is a powerful Zulu word that means we don’t exist on our own and that we are never alone because we are part of a bigger connected world of humanity. Before coming to South Africa, I lived in a society where being an individual was more valued than being part of a community. It’s not like that here. In traditional Africa, ‘us’ is more meaningful than ‘me’. Ubuntu means that I am who I am only because of who we all are together.