Quotes from Rebecca Goldstein

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.

The guardians of the just state should be the most underprivileged of all its citizens. It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. "At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.

I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158)

Einstein's and Gödel's metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality—existing independent of our thinking of it—or, rather, are subjective human projections, socially shared intellectual constructs.

The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it's the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.

Freedom for me is a pain in the Buridan's ass.

I feel an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I've found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.

Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself.

All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.

The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.

leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The

As Plato: It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.

He hadn't altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.

For Goddsakes, am I, who carries an entire world within me, a body?

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

For such a woman, a child is so substantial a setback to her own ambition that, in order to offset the setback, the child must earn back its existence by being so exceptional as to add to, rather than subtract from, the ambitious mother's tallying of her successes. So feminism, I am sorry to say, has only intensified the projectification of children.

The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential.

You are summoned for no reason other than that you are a Jew, as if Jew were a mass term comparable, say, to water or salt. Here is a bit of water, we say, and any sample of it will do. All water manifests itself the same interchangeable water properties. That a Nazi should think this way about Jews is not in the least surprising. Mass terms, mass murders, mass graves: they are all of a piece.

There's no reason. Mazel, Maurice. Only mazel." (p. 343)