Saturday, December 21, 2013

The drive to eliminate paradoxes at any cost, especially when it requires the creation of highly artificial formalisms, puts to much stress on bland consistency, and too little on the quirky and bizarre, which make life and mathematics interesting.

--Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

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“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

 -Immanuel Kant, in  Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose