"Consequently, these laws of nature need only be discovered, and then man will no longer be answerable for his actions, and his life will become extremely easy. Needless to say, all human actions will then be calculated according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, up to 108,000, and entered into a calendar; or, better still, some well-meaning publications will appear, like the present-day encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so precisely calculated and designated that there will no longer be any actions or adventures in the world." (Fyodor Dostoevsky, "Notes from Underground", 1864)
"Every fact is a logarithm; one added term ramifies it until it is thoroughly transformed. In the general aspect of things, the great lines of creation take shape and arrange themselves into groups; beneath lies the unfathomable." (Victor Hugo, "The Toilers of the Sea", 1866)
"What logarithms are to mathematics that mathematics are to the other sciences." (Friederich von Hardenberg [Novalis], "Schriften", 1901)
"Those terrible logarithms, when I happened to open a table of them, made my head swim, with their columns of figures; actual fright, not unmixed with respect, overwhelmed me on the very threshold of that arithmetical cave." (Jean-Henri Fabre, "The Life of the Fly", 1913)
"She thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence." (Pamela Zoline, "The Heat Death of the Universe", 1967)
"You could probably prove, by judicious use of logarithms and congruent triangles, that real life is a lot more like soap opera than most people will admit." (Molly Ivins, The Progressive, 1988)
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