Quotes from John Derbyshire

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always.

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.

Ninety percent of paid work is time-wasting crap. The world gets by on the other ten.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.

The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.

The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

Our political system is now run by the Big People for their own interests. If they ever deign to notice the Little People, it is with disdain and contempt.

Mathematicians call it "the arithmetic of congruences." You can think of it as clock arithmetic. Temporarily replace the 12 on a clock face with 0. The 12 hours of the clock now read 0, 1, 2, 3, … up to 11. If the time is eight o'clock, and you add 9 hours, what do you get? Well, you get five o'clock. So in this arithmetic, 8 + 9 = 5; or, as mathematicians say, 8 + 9 ? 5 (mod 12), pronounced "eight plus nine is congruent to five, modulo twelve.

Puritans don't laugh—except at the sight of a burning witch.

A very civilized thing, glass—almost an index of civilization. When civilization retreats, it leaves behind broken glass.

A few decades back one could get a pretty good idea of someone's overall political stance by finding out how much he hates rich people; the equivalent today is finding out how much he hates white people.

It was in 1742 that Christian Goldbach put forward his famous conjecture that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.

which has inspired at least one novel, Apostolos Doxiadis's Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture29).

If you're not thinking about numbers, you're probably not thinking.

Western culture is in its twilight; there is a dark age ahead; and while college-humanities fads and 'secular-progressive values' have certainly done much damage, they are symptoms, not causes—fragments of junk sucked into a vacuum. The fundamental reason why so much of our culture is shit—either literally, like Signor Manzoni's masterwork, or figuratively—is exhaustion, cultural exhaustion.

Bernhard Riemann was a very pure case of the intuitive mathematician. This needs some explaining. The mathematical personality has two large components, the logical and the intuitive. Both are present in any good mathematician, but often one or the other is strongly dominant.

We are a rugged species, up for anything the universe can throw at us; and as the great gloominaries knew, we will be immeasurably better prepared for nasty surprises if we approach the universe realistically — pessimistically — than if we continue to peer out at our surroundings through a distorting, rose-colored prism of wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The remarkable thing about the Diversity cult is that all the circumstances of the actual human world refute its tenets, wherever we look. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that there has never been an ideology so heartily and jealously embraced by all the main institutions of a society, that was at the same time so obviously at odds with the evidence of our senses. It is as if the entire Western world had committed itself to the belief that human beings can fly by flapping their arms.

Once this was a nation of farmers, builders, inventors, creators, explorers, and thinkers. Now we are a nation of bubblehead academic poseurs, race-guilt hucksters, and keening middle-class "victims" of imaginary wrongs.

Asked if Stalin was an antisemite, Robert Conquest replied: Yes, but it hardly noticed. He was broadly and generously anti-human.