Positive Real Number

Famous quotes containing the words positive, real and/or number:

    “Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has “cast up” in my time or is like to—this art by which even the “poor” can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn’t it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?”
    —Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866)

    “Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.”
    —Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)