Quotes: Arithmetic

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

We have the most crude accounting tools. It’s tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn’t tell us the things that we need to know.

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky – or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

God does arithmetic.

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.

I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.

The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician.

Schools are really bad now. Schools are not only bad in reading, writing and arithmetic, they’re worse in cultural aspects, like in music and art. They don’t teach you anything.

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I’d do arithmetic exercises.