Stephen Budiansky > Quotes

“Life is a struggle, and it is the struggle that gives it meaning. The only thing to do was to give one’s all, and leave the consequences to fate.7”
― Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

“And he plainly disagreed with the reverence for Wittgenstein’s idea that mathematics, like language, was merely a tool, a set of rules or a syntax that had no inherent meaning in itself.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“provisions of the Constitution . . . are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil.50 The most important provisions . . . constitute the original inheritance of the American people, which they brought over with them from England. . . . Constitutions are not made, but they grow by an inherent law of progress and adaptation to changing circumstances.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

“they were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the new “scientific” anti-Semitic theories that ascribed a host of loathsome traits to Jews’ inherent racial characteristics.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“His other way of getting people to know who he was was by constantly dropping in to their offices and asking about their work.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union

“Hungary was drawn along in the same vortex of intellectual excitement and scientific progress that enveloped the rest of the empire. An extraordinary constellation of the twentieth century’s leading physicists and mathematicians were the product of its equally exceptional educational system at the turn of the century—John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Theodor von Kármán, Paul Erdös, and George Pólya, among many others. All came from Hungary’s Jewish middle class, all would flee Hitler’s Europe, and many would end up working during the Second World War for the Manhattan Project, helping to ensure that America, and not Germany, would be the first to build the atomic bomb. The educational reforms instituted in the era of ascendant liberal values in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire emphasized creative thinking and experimental curiosity over rote learning.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“never to be caught by another Pearl Harbor.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union

“It is dangerous that by sudden invasions men shall be drawn to the use of his weapons before he hath skill how to use it,”
― Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage

“In this he was diametrically opposed to the Platonist conception of mathematics as a body of ideal truths, preexisting somewhere “out there” independent of the human mind and awaiting human discovery.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“it was the Austrian universities that helped to make anti-Semitism respectable throughout the country.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“Brouwer’s radical view that mathematics is entirely a human construct was one Wittgenstein also fully shared. Brouwer dismissed the idea that mathematics in any sense constitutes an “objective” truth.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“there is less danger in fearing too much than too little”—”
― Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage

“Schönerer, he related in Mein Kampf how much he had learned during his years in Vienna from watching the mayor’s skill in flattering the urban proletariat, and in understanding that the less propaganda is based on intellectual appeals and reason, and the more on “the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

“He would come to insist as corner stone of his legal philosophy that law is fundamentally a statement of society’s willingness to use force, every law means I will sooner kill than not have my way, as he put it, It was because he did not want the men who threw ideas around ever again to escape responsibility for where those ideas led, it was the same reason he lost the enthusiastic belief he once had in the cause of women suffrage, political decisions had better come from those who do the killing… In war time there’s more justification for limiting speech since the danger is proportionately greater.”
― Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas