Quotes About Magnitude

There was simply no historical precedent for solving a financial crisis of this magnitude without significant taxpayer dollars and the political will to undertake the effort.

Congress would not take up reforms of this magnitude in a presidential election year.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

The historical resentments and patterns that can demolish a marriage usually start out as something seemingly unimportant. An assumption here. An accommodation there. An omission, an unclear boundary, a selfish act, an inconsideration, etc. These little things, these seemingly tiny tremors, have a rolling aftershock that can gain significant magnitude over time.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.

Every film that gets made, and I'm not just talking about 'Star Wars,' I'm talking about Marvel, DC, every tent pole film - they seem to just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The worlds get bigger, the stakes get bigger.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.

War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.

The stars looked down at me from infinite space. We are tiny, they said, but you are insignificant.

An atom bomb—does it reduce everything to atoms—to a mist the size of the moon? And the hydrogen bomb—is there water in it? When you drop it, does the mushroom above it look like a splash, as if you'd dropped the moon onto the ocean? If you dropped the moon onto the Pacific, would its diameter fit? Eight moons dropped onto the Pacific would fit on it.

Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great.

No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.

The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific.

Computing pioneer Edsger Dijkstra pointed out that computing is the only profession in which a single mind is obliged to span the distance from a bit to a few hundred megabytes, a ratio of 1 to 109, or nine orders of magnitude (Dijkstra 1989).

As soon as you add an intensifier, you're turning an all-or-none dichotomy into a graduated scale.

Consider God's love for you. Now double it. Now multiply that by 900 trillion. You're still not even close.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

I love you, with a love so great that it simply couldn't keep growing inside my heart, but had to leap out and reveal itself in all its magnitude.

And what about the idea that hitting a child merely teaches them to hit? First: No. Wrong. Too simple. For starters, "hitting" is a very unsophisticated word to describe the disciplinary act of an effective parent. If "hitting" accurately described the entire range of physical force, then there would be no difference between rain droplets and atom bombs. Magnitude matters—and so does context, if we're not being wilfully blind and naïve about the issue.

irrational behavior is as unacceptable to a certain species of economist as the irrational magnitude of the hypotenuse was to the Pythagoreans. It doesn't fit their model of what can be; and yet it is.

A época das massas é a época do colossal.

I think I'm more concerned with things that are very big and things that are very small than with all the stuff in between.

the total number of galaxies in the universe seems to be in the region of ten billion, and that each of them has about a hundred billion stars the size of the sun.

We've had a history of hurricanes, but none of them of the magnitude that we're seeing Irma turn out to be.