Actual Infinity/aristotles Potential%e2%80%93actual Distinction

Famous quotes containing the words actual, infinity and/or distinction:

    Mathematics ... would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will, therefore, always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in pursuit of it. No, we are complicated machines; and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometime stop that motion.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
    Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)