Point Arithmetic

Famous quotes containing the words point and/or arithmetic:

    Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
    —G.C. (Georg Christoph)

    Under the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the power of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)