Daily question, August 19, 2026
Politics
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Source: Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Warns that planners often overestimate how much any single mind can know about a whole economy.
Mathematics
The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.
Source: Georg Cantor, Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre
Cantor wrote this defending infinite sets against contemporaries who called the theory a disease; definitions need no external license.
Physics
I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought.
Source: Erwin Schrodinger, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, 1935
Schrodinger on entanglement, the property he named, calling it the feature that most separates quantum from classical physics.
Psychology
Give me a dozen healthy infants... I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select.
Source: John B. Watson, Behaviorism
Watson's boast is the founding manifesto of behaviorism: give me the environment and I will give you the person, nature aside.
Philosophy
Existence precedes essence.
Source: Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre meant there is no blueprint for what a person is supposed to be before that person starts choosing.
Biology
We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
Source: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
A gene-centered image of evolution that reframed organisms as vehicles; critics say it overstates the gene's independence from the body.
