Daily question, August 13, 2026
Politics
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Source: Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
A distributive principle meant to replace wages tied to output with one tied to need.
Mathematics
Numbers are the free creation of the human mind.
Source: Richard Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?
Dedekind built the integers from sets rather than treating them as given; the line stakes out numbers as construction, not discovery.
Physics
It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.
Source: Ernest Rutherford, Forty Years of Physics, 1936
Rutherford's reaction to the gold foil experiment, the discovery that atoms have a small dense nucleus.
Psychology
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Source: Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Frankl wrote this from inside a concentration camp; it became the founding claim of logotherapy, that meaning survives stripped choice.
Philosophy
Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.
Source: Epictetus, Enchiridion
Epictetus taught as a former slave who owned nothing outright but his own judgments about what happened to him.
Biology
Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.
Source: Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity
Monod's closing line after arguing that mutation is chance and selection is blind necessity, with no purpose written into either.
