Calculating Quotes
When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
Frédéric Bastiat
There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.
Edgar Allan Poe
Rules emerge as a spontaneous order–they are found–not deliberately designed by one calculating mind. Initially constructivist institutions undergo evolutionary change adapting beyond the circumstances that gave them birth. What emerges is a form of "social mind” that solves complex organization problems without conscious cognition.
Vernon L. Smith
Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting
your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a
warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you.
Anthony Bourdain
I am not prepared to stand aside and see this country engulfed by the racial conflict which calculating orators or ignorant prejudice can create. Nor in the great world confrontation on race and colour, where this country must declare where it stands, am I prepared to be a neutral, whether that confrontation is in Birmingham or Bulawayo. In these issues there can be no neutrals and no escape from decision. For in the world of today, while political isolationism invites danger and economic isolationism invites bankruptcy, moral isolationism invites contempt.
Harold Wilson
I believe that it is possible by means of horizontal and vertical lines, constructed 'consciously' but not 'calculating', guided by a higher intuition and brought to harmony and rhythm – I believe that these fundamental aesthetic shapes – where necessary supplemented by lines in other directions or curved lines, make it possible to arrive at a work of art which is as strong as it is true. For anyone who sees more deeply, there is nothing vague about this; it is only vague for the superficial observer of nature. And 'chance' must be as far removed as 'calculation'. And for the rest it seems to me that it is necessary to keep breaking off the horizontal or vertical line: for if these directions were not countered by others, they would themselves come to signify something 'specific' and thus human.
Piet Mondrian
An important distinction exists between prospective and retrospective methods of calculating economic quantities such as incomes, savings, and investments; and... a corresponding distinction of great theoretical importance must be drawn between two alternative methods of defining these quantities. Quantities defined in terms of measurements made at the end of the period in question are referred to as ex post; quantities defined in terms of action planned at the beginning of the period in question are referred to as ex ante.
Gunnar Myrdal
Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting. Thinking is language – record-keeping – and has to take place before and after. Einstein did not think when he was calculating: he calculated – producing the next equation in reaction to the one that went before – just as in painting one form is a response to another and so on.
Gerhard Richter