📒🆉George Zebrowski - Collected Quotes

"An infinity of universes swim in superspace, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some future transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Apocalypse is the eye of a needle, through which we pass into a different world." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Part of human life is the need to reassure ourselves about the future that we may never live to see, rather than fool ourselves, as many did in the last century, that there won’t be any future and they might as well lie down and die." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Picture this: a mobile space colony, supporting more than a million people. No, not a colony, but an organism which can move and grow as long as it can obtain resources and maintain a food supply within its ecology. It’s a living organism because it can respond to stimuli through its optical and sensory nervous system. It thinks with the intellects of its human and cybernetic intelligences. And it can reproduce, which is what we expect from a living organism." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"Progress is a tension between the notion of perfection and the notion that striving, not finding, is important." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia", 1979)

"An infinity of universes swim in superspace, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some future transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife", 1979)

"She reached out across the cathedral of space-time to those hopelessly distant candle-furnaces, where all the material elements had been forged again and again inside the generation of suns, where alien sunspaces were certain to contain other humanities, however different, and she wondered if someone there might be her friend." (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife", 1979)

"In a perfectly rational universe, infinities turn back on themselves [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Is Science Rational?", OMNI Magazine, 1994)

"The rationality of our universe is best suggested by the fact that we can discover more about it from any starting point, as if it were a fabric that will unravel from any thread." (George Zebrowski, "Is Science Rational?", OMNI Magazine, 1994)

"Time is a relationship that we have with the rest of the universe; or more accurately, we are one of the clocks, measuring one kind of time." (George Zebrowski, OMNI Magazine, 1994)

"Science, when it runs up against infinities, seeks to eliminate them, because a proliferation of entities is the enemy of explanation." (George Zebrowski, "Time Is Nothing But A Clock" , OMNI Magazine Vol. 17 (1), 1994)

🆉John M Ziman - Collected Quotes

"Many philosophers have now sadly come to the conclusion that there is no ultimate procedure which will wring the last drops of uncertainty from what scientists call their knowledge." (John M Ziman, "Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science", 1968)

"Although the best and most famous scientific discoveries seem to open whole new windows of the mind, a typical scientific paper has never pretended to be more than another piece in a large jig-saw not significant in itself but as an element in a grander scheme. This technique, of soliciting many modest contributions to the vast store of human knowledge, has been the secret of western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate collective power that is far greater than any one individual can exert. Primary scientific papers are not meant to be final statements of indisputable truths; each is merely a tiny tentative step forward, through the jungle of ignorance." (John M Zimer, Vol. 224, 1969)

"It is not enough to observe, experiment, theorize, calculate and communicate; we must also argue, criticize, debate, expound, summarize, and otherwise transform the information that we have obtained individually into reliable, well established, public knowledge." (John M Ziman, "Information, Communication, Knowledge", Nature Vol. 224 (5217), 1969)

"The sooner we all face up to the fact that theory and practice are indissoluble, and that there is no contradiction between the qualities of usefulness and beauty, the better." (John M Ziman, "Growth and Spread of Science", Nature Vol. 221 (5180), 1969)

"A significant fraction of the ordinary scientific literature in any field is concerned with essentially irrational theories put forward by a few well-established scholars who have lost touch with reality." (John M Ziman, "Some Pathologies of the Scientific Life", Nature Vol. 227, 1970)

"The communication of modern science to the ordinary citizen, necessary, important, desirable as it is, cannot be considered an easy task. The prime obstacle is lack of education. [...] There is also the difficulty of making scientific discoveries interesting and exciting without completely degrading them intellectually. [...] It is a weakness of modern science that the scientist shrinks from this sort of publicity, and thus gives an impression of arrogant mystagoguery." (John M Ziman,"The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific Dimension of Society", 1976)

"Physics defines itself as the science devoted to discovering, developing and refining those aspects of reality that are amenable to mathematical analysis." (John M Ziman, "Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science", 1978)

"The most astonishing achievements of science, intellectually and practically, have been in physics, which many people take to be the ideal type of scientific knowledge. In fact, physics is a very special type of science, in which the subject matter is deliberately chosen so as to be amenable to quantitative analysis." (John M Ziman, "Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science", 1978)

"'Disorder' is not mere chaos; it implies defective order." (John M Ziman, "Models of Disorder", 1979)

"A philosopher is a person who knows less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything. […] A scientist is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing." (John M Ziman, "Knowing Everything about Nothing: Specialization and Change in Scientific Careers", 1987)

"Any research organization requires generous measures of the following: (1) Social space for personal initiative and creativity; (2) Time for ideas to grow to maturity; (3) Openness to debate and criticism; (4) Hospitality towards novelty; and (5) Respect for specialized expertise." (John M Ziman, "Prometheus Bound", 1994)

"Theoretical physicists are like pure mathematicians, in that they are often interested in the hypothetical behaviour of entirely imaginary objects, such as parallel universes, or particles traveling faster than light, whose actual existence is not being seriously proposed at all." (John M Ziman, "Real Science: What it Is, and what it Means", 2000)

🆉Scott L Zeger - Collected Quotes

"Longitudinal data sets are comprised of repeated observations of an outcome and a set of covariates for each of many subjects. One objective of statistical analysis is to describe the marginal expectation of the outcome variable as a function of the covariates while accounting for the correlation among the repeated observations for a given subject." (Scott L Zeger & Kung-Yee Liang, "Longitudinal Data Analysis for Discrete and Continuous Outcomes", Biometrics Vol. 42(1), 1986)

"Longitudinal data sets in which the outcome variable cannot be transformed to be Gaussian are more difficult to analyze for two reasons. First, simple models for the conditional expectation of the outcome do not imply equally simple models for the marginal expectation, as is the case for Gaussian data. Hence, the analyst must choose to model either the marginal or conditional expectation. Second, likelihood analyses often lead to estimators of the regression coefficients which are consistent only when the time dependence is correctly specified." (Scott L Zeger & Kung-Yee Liang, "Longitudinal Data Analysis for Discrete and Continuous Outcomes", Biometrics Vol. 42(1), 1986)

"Statistical models are sometimes misunderstood in epidemiology. Statistical models for data are never true. The question whether a model is true is irrelevant. A more appropriate question is whether we obtain the correct scientific conclusion if we pretend that the process under study behaves according to a particular statistical model." (Scott Zeger, "Statistical reasoning in epidemiology", American Journal of Epidemiology, 1991)

"Statistical models for data are never true. The question whether a model is true is irrelevant. A more appropriate question is whether we obtain the correct scientific conclusion if we pretend that the process under study behaves according to a particular statistical model." (Scott Zeger, "Statistical reasoning in epidemiology", American Journal of Epidemiology, 1991)

"Statistical reasoning is based upon two simple precepts: (1) that natural processes can usefully be described by stochastic models and (2) that by studying apparently haphazard collections of autonomous individuals, one can discover, at a higher level, systematic patterns of potential scientific import." (Scott Zeger, "Statistical reasoning in epidemiology", American Journal of Epidemiology, 1991)

"The rise of statistical reasoning was a key step in the birth of many empirical sciences, especially epidemiology. The ability to focus on the aggregate behavior amidst apparently chaotic variation across autonomous individuals has dramatically increased our understanding of disease processes that affect the health of the public. Simple statistical models based upon the laws of probability provide the language for this population perspective." (Scott Zeger, "Statistical reasoning in epidemiology", American Journal of Epidemiology, 1991)

"Longitudinal data comprise repeated observations over time on each of many individuals. Longitudinal data are in contrast to cross-sectional data where only a single response is available for each person. The statistical analysis of longitudinal data presents special opportunities and challenges because the repeated outcomes for one individual tend to be correlated with one another." (Scott L Zeger & Kung‐Yee Liang, "An overview of methods for the analysis of longitudinal data", Statistics in medicine vol. 11, 1992)

"We have two objectives for statistical models of longitudinal data: (1) to adopt the conventional regression tools, which relate the response variables to the explanatory variables; and (2) to account for the within subject correlation." (Scott L Zeger & Kung‐Yee Liang, "An overview of methods for the analysis of longitudinal data", Statistics in medicine vol. 11, 1992)

🆉Ernst Zermelo - Collected Quotes

"As for me (and probably I am not alone in this opinion), I believe that a single universally valid principle summarizing an abundance of established experimental facts according to the rules of induction, is more reliable than a theory which by its nature can never be directly verified; so I prefer to give up the theory rather than the principle, if the two are incompatible." (Ernst Zermelo, "Über mechanische Erklärungen irreversibler Vorgänge. Eine Antwort auf Hrn. Boltzmann’s ‘Entgegnung’" Annalen der Physik und Chemie 59, 1896)

"It is not admissible to accept this property simply as a fact for the initial states that we can observe at present, for it is not a certain unique variable we have to deal with (as, for example, the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit which is just decreasing for a still very long time) but the entropy of any arbitrary system free of external influences. How does it happen, then, that in such a system there always occurs only an increase of entropy and equalization of temperature and concentration differences, but never the reverse? And to what extent are we justified in expecting that this behaviour will continue, at least for the immediate future? A satisfactory answer to these questions must be given in order to be allowed to speak of a truly mechanical analogue of the Second Law." (Ernst Zermelo, "Über mechanische Erklärungen irreversibler Vorgänge. Eine Antwort auf Hrn. Boltzmann’s ‘Entgegnung’" Annalen der Physik und Chemie 59, 1896)

"[...] the spirit of the mechanical view of nature itself which will always force us to assume that all imaginable mechanical initial states are physically possible, at least within certain boundaries." (Ernst Zermelo, "Über einen Satz der Dynamik und die mechanische Wärmetheorie", Annalen der Physik und Chemie 57, 1896)

"Banishing fundamental facts or problems from science merely because they cannot be dealt with by means of certain prescribed principles would be like forbidding the further extension of the theory of parallels in geometry because the axiom upon which this theory rests has been shown to be unprovable. Actually, principles must be judged from the point of view of science, and not science from the point of view of principles fixed once and for all." (Ernst Zermelo, "Neuer Beweis für die Möglichkeit einer Wohlordnung", Mathematische Annalen 65, 1908)

"Generally speaking, mathematical theorems are no analytic judgements yet, but we can reduce them to analytic ones through the hypothetical addition of synthetic premises. The logically reduced mathematical theorems emerging in this way are analytically hypothetical judgements which constitute the logical skeleton of a mathematical theory." (Ernst Zermelo, "Mathematische Logik. Vorlesungen gehalten von Prof. Dr. E. Zermelo zu Göttingen im S.S.", 1908)

"If one intends to base arithmetic on the theory of natural numbers as finite cardinals, one has to deal mainly with the definition of finite set; for the cardinal is, according to its nature, a property of a set, and any proposition about finite cardinals can always be expressed as a proposition about finite sets. In the following I will try to deduce the most important property of natural numbers, namely the principle of complete induction, from a definition of finite set which is as simple as possible, at the same time showing that the different definitions [of finite set] given so far are equivalent to the one given here." (Ernst Zermelo,  "Ueber die Grundlagen der Arithmetik", Atti del IV Congresso Internazionale dei Matematici, 1908)

"It has been argued that mathematics is not or, at least, not exclusively an end in itself; after all it should also be applied to reality. But how can this be done if mathematics consisted of definitions and analytic theorems deduced from them and we did not know whether these are valid in reality or not. One can argue here that of course one first has to convince oneself whether the axioms of a theory are valid in the area of reality to which the theory should be applied. In any case, such a statement requires a procedure which is outside logic.” (Ernst Zermelo, "Mathematische Logik - Vorlesungen gehalten von Prof. Dr. E. Zermelo zu Göttingen im S. S", 1908)

"Now even in mathematics unprovability, as is well known, is in no way equivalent to nonvalidity, since, after all, not everything can be proved, but every proof in turn presupposes unproved principles. Thus, in order to reject such a fundamental principle, one would have to ascertain that in some particular case it did not hold or to derive contradictory consequences from it; but none of my opponents has made any attempt to do this." (Ernst Zermelo, "Neuer Beweis für die Möglichkeit einer Wohlordnung", Mathematische Annalen 65, 1908)

🆉Gary Zukav - Collected Quotes

"According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"Every subatomic interaction consists of the annihilation of the original particles and the creation of new subatomic particles. The subatomic world is a continual dance of creation and annihilation, of mass changing into energy and energy changing into mass. Transient forms sparkle in and out of existence, creating a never-ending, forever newly created reality." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"Quantum mechanics also uses statistics, but there is a very big difference between quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics. In quantum mechanics, there is no way to predict individual events This is the startling lesson that experiments in the subatomic realm have taught us. [...] Quantum physics abandons the laws which govern individual events and states directly the statistical laws which govern collections of events. Quantum mechanics can tell us how a group of particles will behave, but the only thing that it can say about an individual particle is how it probably will behave. Probability is one of the major characteristics of quantum mechanics." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"The 'complete description' that quantum theory claims the wave function to be is a description of physical reality (as in physics). No matter what we are feeling, or thinking about, or looking at, the wave function describes as completely as possible where and when we are doing it. [...] Since the wave function is thought to be a complete description of physical reality and since that which the wave function describes is idea-like as well as matter-like, then physical reality must be both idea-like and matter-like. In other words, the world cannot be as it appears. Incredible as it sounds, this is the conclusion of the orthodox view of quantum mechanics." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"The conceptual framework of quantum mechanics, supported by massive volumes of experimental data, forces contemporary physicists to express themselves in a manner that sounds, even to the uninitiated, like the language of mystics." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"The development of physics in the twentieth century already has transformed the consciousness of those involved with it. The study (of modern physics) produces insights into the nature of reality very similar to those produced by the study of eastern philosophy." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"The new physics tells us that an observer cannot observe without altering what he sees. Observer and observed are interrelated in a real and fundamental sense. The exact nature of this interrelation is not clear, but there is a growing body of evidence that the distinction between the 'in here' and the 'out there' is illusion." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"There is another fundamental difference between the old physics and the new physics. The old phvsics assumes that there is an external world which exists apart from us. It further assumes that we can observe measure and speculate about the external world without changing it. According to the old physics the external world is indifferent to us and to our needs. [...] The new physics, quantum mechanics, tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it. If we observe a certain particle collision experiment, not only do we have no way of proving that the result would have been the same if we had not been watching it, all that we know indicates that it would not have been the same, because the result that we got was affected by the fact that we were looking for it." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"Unfortunately, when most people think of 'physics', they think of chalkboards covered with undecipherable symbols of an unknown mathematics. The fact is that physics is not mathematics. Physics, in essence, is simple wonder at the way things are and a divine (some call it compulsive) interest in how that is so. Mathematics is the tool of physics. Stripped of mathematics, physics becomes pure enchantment." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

"What we think of as physical reality is an intermingling of appropriate realities, a fluid massive consciousness in which each of us exists independently of each other and yet coexists interdependently with each other." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)

🆉Anthony Zee - Collected Quotes

"As glimpsed by physicists, Nature's rules are simple, but also intricate: Different rules are subtly related to each other. The intricate relations between the rules produce interesting effects in many physical situations. [...] Nature's design is not only simple, but minimally so, in the sense that were the design any simpler, the universe would be a much duller place." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"In science, one tries to say what no one else has ever said before. In poetry, one tries to say what everyone else has already said, but better. This explains, in essence, why good poetry is as rare as good science." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"In the path-integral formulation, the essence of quantum physics may be summarized with two fundamental rules: (1). The classical action determines the probability amplitude for a specific chain of events to occur, and (2) the probability that either one or the other chain of events occurs is determined by the probability amplitudes corresponding to the two chains of events. Finding these rules represents a stunning achievement by the founders of quantum physics." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"Physicists dream of a unified description of Nature. Symmetry, in its power to tie together apparently unrelated aspects of physics, is linked closely to the notion of unity." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"Physics is the most reductionistic of sciences. [...] Contemporary physics rests on the cornerstone of reductionism. As we delve deeper, Nature appears ever simpler. That this is so is, in fact, astonishing. We have no a priori reason to expect the universe, with its fantastic wealth of bewilderingly complex phenomena, to be governed ultimately by a few simple rules." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"The beauty that Nature has revealed to physicists in Her laws is a beauty of design, a beauty that recalls, to some extent, the beauty of classical architecture, with its emphasis on geometry and symmetry. The system of aesthetics used by physicists in judging Nature also draws its inspiration from the austere finality of geometry." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"The impossibility of defining absolute motion can be seen as the manifestation of a symmetry known as relativistic invariance. In the same way that parity invariance tells us that we cannot distinguish the mirror-image world from our world, relativistic invariance tells us that it is impossible to decide whether we are at rest or moving steadily." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"The power and glory of symmetry allow us to bypass completely the construction of strong interaction theories of dubious utility. We are able to contain and isolate our ignorance. [...] Symmetry tells us that states in the same multiplet must have the same energy, but it cannot tell us what that energy is." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"The precise mathematical definition of symmetry involves the notion of invariance. A geometrical figure is said to be symmetric under certain operations if those operations leave it unchanged." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"The search for fundamental symmetries boils down to the study of transformations that do not change fundamental physical action - such transformations as reflection, rotation, the Lorentz transformation, and the like." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"To detect a symmetry in the fundamental design, one would have to check the covariance of each of the many equations of motion in the differential formulation. With the action formulation, on the other hand, one has the considerably easier task of checking the invariance of the action." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"Toward the end of the last century, many physicists felt that the mathematical description of physics was getting ever more complicated. Instead, the mathematics involved has become ever more abstract, rather than more complicated. The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated. He also appears to like group theory." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"Unlike an architect, Nature does not go around expounding on the wondrous symmetries of Her design. Instead, theoretical physicists must deduce them. Some symmetries, such as parity and rotational invariances, are intuitively obvious. We expect Nature to possess these symmetries, and we are shocked if She does not. Other symmetries, such as Lorentz invariance and general covariance, are more subtle and not grounded in our everyday perceptions. But, in any case, in order to find out if Nature employs a certain symmetry, we must compare the implications of the symmetry with observation." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"We intuitively know space to be a smooth continuum, an arena in which the fundamental particles move and interact. This assumption underpins our physical theories, and no experimental evidence has ever contradicted it. However, the possibility that space may not be smooth cannot be excluded." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

"Welcome to the strange world of the quantum, where one cannot determine how a particle gets from here to there. Physicists are reduced to bookies, posting odds on the various possibilities." (Anthony Zee, "Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics", 1986)

📒🆉Yevgeny Zamiatin - Collected Quotes

"All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923) 

"Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary; most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death."  (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers; the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law - like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy)." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters", 1923)

"A human being is like a novel: until the last page you don’t know how it will

end. Or it wouldn’t be worth reading [...]" (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"A true physician begins his cure with a healthy man." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"All unknowns are organically inimical to man, and homo sapiens is human in the full sense of the word only when his grammar is entirely free of question marks." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Dreams are a serious psychic disease." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"Everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential."(Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)  

"Everything in human society is being continually perfected - and should be." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Human heads are opaque, with only tiny windows in them - the eyes." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"I wondered at the ancients who had never realized the utter absurdity of their literature and poetry. The enormous, magnificent power of the literary word was completely wasted. It’s simply ridiculous - everyone wrote anything he pleased." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Laughter can be of different colors. It is only an echo of a distant explosion within you. It may be festive - red, blue, and golden fireworks; or - torn fragments of a human body flying up..." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Neither mathematics nor death ever makes a mistake." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Oh, great, divinely bounding wisdom of walls and barriers! They are, perhaps, the greatest of man’s inventions. Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first wall." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"Only the rational and useful is beautiful." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"The cruelest thing is to make a person doubt his own reality." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The entire history of mankind, insofar as we know it, is the history of transition from nomadic to increasingly settled forms of existence. And does it not follow that the most settled form (ours) is at the same time the most perfect (ours)?" (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of infinity into convenient, easily digestible portions - differentials. This is precisely what lends my field, mathematics, its divine beauty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The inevitable mark of truth is - its cruelty." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"The knife is the strongest, the most immortal, the most brilliant of man’s creations. The knife has been a guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"This is entirely unlike the disorderly, disorganized elections of the ancients, when - absurd to say - the very results of the election were unknown beforehand. Building a state on entirely unpredictable eventualities, blindly - what can be more senseless?" (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom, and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains. The chains - you understand? That’s what world sorrow was about." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"'We' is from God, and 'I' from the devil." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"Why do you think that foolishness is bad? If human foolishness had been as carefully nurtured and cultivated as intelligence has been for centuries, perhaps it would have turned into something extremely precious." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

"You love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924) 

"You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficial yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy." (Yevgeny Zamiatin, "We", 1924)

🆉Lotfi A Zadeh - Collected Quotes

"A fuzzy set is a class of objects with a continuum of grades of membership. Such a set is characterized by a membership (characteristic) function which assigns to each object a grade of membership ranging between zero and one. The notions of inclusion, union, intersection, complement, relation, convexity, etc., are extended to such sets, and various properties of these notions in the context of fuzzy sets are established. In particular, a separation theorem for convex fuzzy sets is proved without requiring that the fuzzy sets be disjoint." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets", 1965)

"The notion of a fuzzy set provides a convenient point of departure for the construction of a conceptual framework which parallels in many respects the framework used in the case of ordinary sets, but is more general than the latter and, potentially, may prove to have a much wider scope of applicability, particularly in the fields of pattern classification and information processing. Essentially, such a framework provides a natural way of dealing with problems in which the source of imprecision is the absence of sharply denned criteria of class membership rather than the presence of random variables." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets", 1965)

"In general, complexity and precision bear an inverse relation to one another in the sense that, as the complexity of a problem increases, the possibility of analysing it in precise terms diminishes. Thus 'fuzzy thinking' may not be deplorable, after all, if it makes possible the solution of problems which are much too complex for precise analysis." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy languages and their relation to human intelligence", 1972)

"As the complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet significant statements about its behavior diminishes until a threshold is reached beyond which precision and significance (or relevance) become almost mutually exclusive characteristics." (Lotfi A Zadeh, 1973)

"The closer one looks at a real-world problem, the fuzzier becomes its solution." (Lotfi A Zadeh, 1973)

"[Fuzzy logic is] a logic whose distinguishing features are (1) fuzzy truth-values expressed in linguistic terms, e. g., true, very true, more or less true, or somewhat true, false, nor very true and not very false, etc.; (2) imprecise truth tables; and (3) rules of inference whose validity is relative to a context rather than exact." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning", 1975)

"[...] much of the information on which human decisions are based is possibilistic rather than probabilistic in nature, and the intrinsic fuzziness of natural languages - which is a logical consequence of the necessity to express information in a summarized form - is, in the main, possibilistic in origin." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets as the Basis for a Theory of Possibility", Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 1978) 

"Fuzziness, then, is a concomitant of complexity. This implies that as the complexity of a task, or of a system for performing that task, exceeds a certain threshold, the system must necessarily become fuzzy in nature. Thus, with the rapid increase in the complexity of the information processing tasks which the computers are called upon to perform, we are reaching a point where computers will have to be designed for processing of information in fuzzy form. In fact, it is the capability to manipulate fuzzy concepts that distinguishes human intelligence from the machine intelligence of current generation computers. Without such capability we cannot build machines that can summarize written text, translate well from one natural language to another, or perform many other tasks that humans can do with ease because of their ability to manipulate fuzzy concepts." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "The Birth and Evolution of Fuzzy Logic", 1989)

"In essence, a basic assumption in classical mathematics is that a concept must admit of precise definition which partitions the class of all objects into two classes: (i) those objects which are instances of the concept; and (ii) those which are not, with no borderline cases allowed. For example, a function is either continuous or discontinuous; it cannot be continuous to a degree. Similarly, a matrix is either symmetric or not symmetric; it cannot be somewhat symmetric or more or asymmetric or symmetric to a degree." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "The Birth and Evolution of Fuzzy Logic", 1989)

"It is important to observe that there is an intimate connection between fuzziness and complexity. Thus, a basic characteristic of the human brain, a characteristic shared in varying degrees with all information processing systems, is its limited capacity to handle classes of high cardinality, that is, classes having a large number of members. Consequently, when we are presented with a class of very high cardinality, we tend to group its elements together into subclasses in such a way as to reduce the complexity of the information processing task involved. When a point is reached where the cardinality of the class of subclasses exceeds the information handling capacity of the human brain, the boundaries of the subclasses are forced to become imprecise and fuzziness becomes a manifestation of this imprecision." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "The Birth and Evolution of Fuzzy Logic", 1989)

"As systems became more varied and more complex, we find that no single methodology suffices to deal with them. This is particularly true of what may be called information intelligent systems - systems which form the core of modern technology. To conceive, design, analyze and use such systems we frequently have to employ the totality of tools that are available. Among such tools are the techniques centered on fuzzy logic, neurocomputing, evolutionary computing, probabilistic computing and related methodologies. It is this conclusion that formed the genesis of the concept of soft computing." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "The Birth and Evolution of Fuzzy Logic: A personal perspective", 1999)

"[...] fuzzy logic [FL] has many distinct facets - facets which overlap and have unsharp boundaries. Among these facets there are four that stand out in importance. They are (i) the logical facet; (ii) the set-theoretic facet: (iii) the relational facet, and (iv) the epistemic facet. […] The logical facet of FL, FL/L, is a logical system or, more accurately, a collection of logical systems which includes as a special case both two-valued and multiple-valued systems. […] The set-theoretic facet of FL, FL/S, is concerned with classes or sets whose boundaries are not sharply defined. […] The relational facet of FL, FL/R, is concerned in the main with representation and manipulation of imprecisely defined functions and relations. […] The epistemic facet of FL, FL/E, is linked to its logical facet and is centered on applications of FL to knowledge representation, information systems, fuzzy databases and the theories of possibility imprecise probabilities." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "The Birth and Evolution of Fuzzy Logic: A personal perspective", 1999)

"In science, it is a long-standing tradition to deal with perceptions by converting them into measurements. But what is becoming increasingly evident is that, to a much greater extent than is generally recognized, conversion of perceptions into measurements is infeasible, unrealistic or counter-productive. With the vast computational power at our command, what is becoming feasible is a counter-traditional move from measurements to perceptions. […] To be able to compute with perceptions it is necessary to have a means of representing their meaning in a way that lends itself to computation." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "The Birth and Evolution of Fuzzy Logic: A personal perspective", 1999)

"A concept which has a position of centrality in fuzzy logic is that of a fuzzy set. Informally, a fuzzy set is a class with a fuzzy boundary, implying a gradual transition from membership to nonmembership. A fuzzy set is precisiated through graduation, that is, through association with a scale of grades of membership. Thus, membership in a fuzzy set is a matter of degree. Importantly, in fuzzy logic everything is or is allowed to be graduated, that is, be a matter of degree. Furthermore, in fuzzy logic everything is or is allowed to be granulated, with a granule being a clump of attribute-values drawn together by indistinguishability, equivalence, similarity, proximity or functionality. Graduation and granulation form the core of fuzzy logic. Graduated granulation is the basis for the concept of a linguistic variable – a variable whose values are words rather than numbers. The concept of a linguistic variable is employed in almost all applications of fuzzy logic." (Lofti A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Logic", 2009) 

"In essence, logic is concerned with formalization of reasoning. Correspondently, fuzzy logic is concerned with formalization of fuzzy reasoning, with the understanding that precise reasoning is a special case of fuzzy reasoning." (Lofti A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Logic", 2009

"Science deals not with reality but with models of reality. In large measure, scientific progress is driven by a quest for better models of reality. In the real world, imprecision, uncertainty and complexity have a pervasive presence. In this setting, construction of better models of reality requires a better understanding of how to deal effectively with imprecision, uncertainty and complexity. To a significant degree, development of fuzzy logic has been, and continues to be, motivated by this need." (Lofti A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Logic", 2009) 

"As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision." (Lotfi A Zadeh)