Quadratic Equation Quotes:

There's a lot of science in it, and as Slartibartfast [in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] said: 'I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.' I've never, ever been able to do one. I remember one occasion at Warwick University, when Jack and Ian were at their wits' end because I couldn't get it. I felt totally ashamed.

- Terry Pratchett

source: "Terry Pratchett: 'Fantasy is uni-age'" by Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. April 22, 2013.

topic: Fans, Quadratic Equation, Quadratics, Great Fans

Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.

- Albert Einstein

topic: Love, Life, God, Logical Ideas, Quadratic Equation

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

- Norman O. Brown

source: Norman O. Brown (1972). “Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History”

topic: Essence, Common Sense, Long, Psychoanalysis, Quadratic Equation

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

- Leonard Woolf

topic: Self, Musical, Records, Quadratic Equation, Quadratics

How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

- Stephen Leacock

topic: Struggle, Fall, Math, Quadratic Equation, Quadratics

Not a lot of people know this, but I'm very good at mathematics. When I was an angry teenager, I used to sit in my room and do quadratic equations to calm myself down.

- Samantha Bond

topic: Teenager, People, Rooms, Quadratic Equation, Quadratics

In the broad light of day mathematicians check their equations and their proofs, leaving no stone unturned in their search for rigour. But, at night, under the full moon, they dream, they float among the stars and wonder at the miracle of the heavens. They are inspired. Without dreams there is no art, no mathematics, no life.

- Michael Atiyah

source: Michael Atiyah (2014). “Michael Atiyah Collected Works: 2002-2013”, p.267, Oxford University Press, USA

topic: Dream, Art, Stars, Rigour, Quadratic Equation

This specter of the female politician, who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in parliament, is just as complete an illusion of the masculine brain, as the other specter whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,--the woman who would forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.

- Frances Power Cobbe

topic: Wife, Brain, Female, Quadratic Equation, Quadratics

...the science of calculation also is indispensable as far as the extraction of the square and cube roots: Algebra as far as the quadratic equation and the use of logarithms are often of value in ordinary cases: but all beyond these is but a luxury; a delicious luxury indeed; but not be in indulged in by one who is to have a profession to follow for his subsistence.

- Thomas Jefferson

source: Thomas Jefferson (1984). “Jefferson: Writings”, p.1386, Library of America

topic: Education, Math, Squares, Quadratic Equation, Quadratics

All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

- Michael Cunningham

topic: Children, Kids, Math, Stop Complaining, Quadratic Equation