John Derbyshire Quotes

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.

Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.

The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas.

A very civilized thing, glass—almost an index of civilization. When civilization retreats, it leaves behind broken glass.

Puritans don’t laugh—except at the sight of a burning witch.

If you're not thinking about numbers, you're probably not thinking.

It was in 1742 that Christian Goldbach put forward his famous conjecture that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

(which has inspired at least one novel, Apostolos Doxiadis's Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture29).

As a result of these news stories, millions of people must have become aware of "niggardly," who otherwise would never have heard it, let alone thought to use it. If this is right, and the word has a new currency, it is probably not the currency I would wish for. The word's new lease of life is probably among manufacturers and retailers of sophomoric humor. I bet that even as I write, some adolescent boys, in the stairwell of some high school somewhere in America, are accusing each other of being niggardly, and sniggering at their own outrageous wit. I bet … Wait a minute. Sniggering? Oh, my God …

A few decades back one could get a pretty good idea of someone’s overall political stance by finding out how much he hates rich people; the equivalent today is finding out how much he hates white people.

Mathematicians call it “the arithmetic of congruences.” You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o’clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o’clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ≡ 5 (mod 12), pronounced “eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.

Published mathematical papers often have irritating assertions of the type: “It now follows that…,” or: “It is now obvious that…,” when it doesn't follow, and isn't obvious at all, unless you put in the six hours the author did to supply the missing steps and checking them. There is a story about the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, whom we shall meet later. In the middle of delivering a lecture, Hardy arrived at a point in his argument where he said, “It is now obvious that….” Here he stopped, fell silent, and stood motionless with furrowed brow for a few seconds. Then he walked out of the lecture hall. Twenty minutes later he returned, smiling, and began, “Yes, it is obvious that….” If he

We are a rugged species, up for anything the universe can throw at us; and as the great gloominaries knew, we will be immeasurably better prepared for nasty surprises if we approach the universe realistically — pessimistically — than if we continue to peer out at our surroundings through a distorting, rose-colored prism of wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Those whom [the Lord] teaches, are always increasing in knowledge, both of themselves and of him. The heart is deep, and, like Ezekiel's vision, presents so many chambers of imagery, one within another, that it requires time to get a considerable acquaintance with it, and we shall never know it thoroughly. It is now more than twenty-eight years since the Lord began to open mine to my own view; and from that time to this, almost every day has discovered to me something which until then was unobserved; and the farther I go, the more I seem convinced that I have entered but a little way. A person who travels in some parts of Derbyshire may easily be satisfied that the country is cavernous; but how large, how deep, how numerous the caverns may be, which are hidden from us by the surface of the ground, and what is contained in them—are questions which our most discerning inquirers cannot fully answer… And if our own hearts are beyond our comprehension, how much more incomprehensible is the heart of Jesus! If sin abounds in us—grace and love superabound in him! His ways and thoughts are higher than ours, as the heavens are higher than the earth; his love has a height, and depth, and length, and breadth, which passes all knowledge! The riches of his grace are unsearchable riches! Eph. 3:8, Eph. 3:18, Eph. 3:19. All that we have received or can receive from him, or know of him in this life, compared with what he is in himself, or what he has for us—is but as the drop of a bucket—compared with the ocean; or a single ray of light—compared with the sun. The waters of the sanctuary flow to us at first almost ankle deep—so graciously does the Lord condescend to our weakness; but they rise as we advance, and constrain us to cry out, with the Apostle, O the depth! We find before us, as Dr. Watts beautifully expresses it, A sea of love and grace unknown, Without a bottom or a shore!

Western culture is in its twilight; there is a dark age ahead; and while college-humanities fads and 'secular-progressive values' have certainly done much damage, they are symptoms, not causes—fragments of junk sucked into a vacuum. The fundamental reason why so much of our culture is shit—either literally, like Signor Manzoni's masterwork, or figuratively—is exhaustion, cultural exhaustion.

Russell

Bernhard Riemann was a very pure case of the intuitive mathematician. This needs some explaining. The mathematical personality has two large components, the logical and the intuitive. Both are present in any good mathematician, but often one or the other is strongly dominant.

If Weierstrass is a rock climber, inching his way methodically up the cliff face, Riemann is a trapeze artist, launching himself boldly into space in the confidence—which to the observer often seems dangerously misplaced—that when he arrives at his destination in the middle of the sky, there will be something there for him to grab. It is plain that Riemann had a strongly visual imagination, and also that his mind leaped to results so powerful, elegant, and fruitful that he could not always force himself to pause to prove them. He was keenly interested in philosophy and physics, and notions gathered from long, deep contemplation of those two disciplines—the flow of sensations through our senses, the organizing of those sensations into forms and concepts, the flow of electricity through a conductor, the movements of liquids and gases— can be glimpsed beneath the surface of his mathematics.

Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class "victims" of imaginary wrongs.

The remarkable thing about the Diversity cult is that all the circumstances of the actual human world refute its tenets, wherever we look. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that there has never been an ideology so heartily and jealously embraced by all the main institutions of a society, that was at the same time so obviously at odds with the evidence of our senses. It is as if the entire Western world had committed itself to the belief that human beings can fly by flapping their arms.

The rules of evidence can deliver very persuasive results, sometimes contrary to the strictly argued certainties of mathematics. […] Hypothesis: No human can possibly be more than nine feet tall. Confirming instance: A human being who is 8'11¾" tall. The discovery of that person confirms the hypothesis … but at the same time casts a long shadow of doubt across it!