People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what ...they have been led to expect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census: property demands a government framed... on the ratio of owners and of owning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... these great improvements of modern times are blessings or curses on us, just in the same ratio as the mental, moral, and relig...ious rule over the animal; or the animal propensities of our nature predominate over the intellectual and moral. The spider elaborates poison from the same flower, in which the bee finds materials out of which she manufactures honey.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Darwin was, like Copernicus, a one-idea man. Each had his "nuclear inspiration" early in life, and spent the rest of his life work...ing it out--the ratio of inspiration to perspiration being heavily in favor of the second. Both lacked the many-sidedness, that universality of interest and amazing multitude of achievement in unrelated fields of research which characterised Kepler, Newton, Descartes, Franklin, Faraday, Maxwell, and hundreds of lesser but equally versatile geniuses. It is perhaps no coincidence that both Darwin and Copernicus, after the decisive turning point when their course was set, led a life of duty, devotion to task, rigorous self-discipline, and spiritual desiccation. It looks as if the artesian wells of their inspiration had been replaced by a mechanical water supply kept under pressure by sheer power of will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquai...ntance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »