Crook Quotes (2 quotes)
How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasture nothing but years of effort can extract it. You can’t hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can’t shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon. So died, for each of us, still bravely fighting, our mathematical training; except for a set of people called “mathematicians”—born so, like crooks.
In Too Much College: Or, Education Eating up Life, with Kindred Essays in Education and Humour (1939), 8.
Thurst [thrust] out nature with a croche [crook], yet woll she styll runne back agayne.
From Proverbs or Adagies out of Erasmus (1539), 44, given with other English variants, in George Latimer Apperson and Martin H. Manser, The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (1993, 2006), 158. The dictionary also gives the original sentiment expressed by Horace: “Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret” in Epistles, i, 10, 24.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
