A Quote by Charles Babbage

Whenever a man can get hold of numbers, they are invaluable: if correct, they assist in informing his own mind, but they are still more useful in deluding the minds of others. Numbers are the masters of the weak, but the slaves of the strong.

Charles Babbage

Quote Topics

Assist Correct Get His Hold Informing Invaluable Man Masters Mind Minds More Numbers Others Own Still Strong Useful Weak Whenever

Quote Author

Charles Babbage
English - Mathematician
December 26, 1791 - October 18, 1871

A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that the “whole’s” verdict – we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.

Ayn Rand

Religion is man-made to assist in controlling the weak minded individuals because during times of atrocity and despair they feel strength in numbers.

Benito Mussolini

The British are weak in numbers, we are weak in spite of our numbers.

Mahatma Gandhi

We live in a digital world where all is available at the touch of a screen. Money has been simplified, changed subtly over time from tangible bills to numbers in cyberspace. Cash is no longer in a cloth bag; it's numbers on a screen. Numbers that can be manipulated and modified. If you run out of numbers, you can just buy some more, right?

Rhys Darby

An invaluable little book.... What Makes a Terrorist uses standard tools of economics and statistical analysis to get at the truth about terrorism.... Krueger finds one familiar fact in all his numbers. Countries with fewer civil liberties tend to produce more terrorists.

Daniel Finkelstein

The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

The hallway was lined with numbered doors, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, and large ornamental vases, too large to hold flowers and too small to hold spies.

Daniel Handler

That's all baseball is, is numbers; it's run by numbers, averages, percentage and odds. Managers make their decisions based on the numbers.

Rollie Fingers

I put up O.K. numbers - not Bugs Bunny-style numbers like some other guys - but O.K. numbers.

Ken Griffey Jr.

I dream in numbers, and I like to look up the meaning of numbers, and numbers stick out to me.

Zoe McLellan

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.

Simone de Beauvoir

Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most.

Joshua Foer

I want to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means, and we'll fill in the missing numbers in each others paint-by-numbers dreams.

Jackson Browne

How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.

Donald Knuth

The mathematical phenomenon always develops out of simple arithmetic, so useful in everyday life, out of numbers, those weapons of the gods: the gods are there, behind the wall, at play with numbers.