1. A great many Cambridge buildings remind one of the Tower of London. Most of the undergraduates whom I met I liked very much. Their dons, as judged by those who were at the "do", are certainly inferior to ours in charm of manners and geniality. One I thought hardly a gentleman.
2. I say, nowhere in the world is such a coincidence observable, and they that will not take it for a portent may go back to their rationalism and consort with microbes and make their meals off logarithms, washed down with an exact distillation of the root of minus one; and the peace of fools, that is the deepest and most balmy of all, be theirs for ever and ever.
3. "The Independent, sir," replied Pott, "is still dragging on a wretched and lingering career. Abhorred and despised by even the few who are cognizant of its miserable and disgraceful existence, stifled by the very filth it so profusely scatters, rendered deaf and blind by the exhalations of its own slime, the obscene journal, happily unconscious of its degraded state, is rapidly sinking beneath that treacherous mud which, while it seems to give it a firm standing with the low and debased classes of society, is nevertheless rising above its detested head, and will speedily engulf it for ever."
4. Whereas at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are.
5. The Dormouse awoke with a start, and began as though it had been awake all the time: "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe--"
"I know, said Alice, "she had so many children that she didn't know what to do."
"Nothing of the sort," said the Dormouse, "you lack the gift of imagination. She put them into Treasuries and Foreign Offices and Boards of Trade, and all sorts of unlikely places where they could learn things."
"What did they learn?" asked Alice.
"Painting in glowing colours, and attrition, and terminology (that's the science of knowing when things are over), and iteration (that's the same thing over again), and drawing--"
"What did they draw?"
"Salaries..."
6. In Mathematicks he was greater Than Tycho Brahe, or Erra Pater: For he by Geometrick scale Could take the size of Pots of Ale; Resolve by Signes and Tangents straight, If Bread or Butter wanted weight; And wisely tell what hour o'th day The clock does strike, by Algebra.
7. You appear, malefactor, to have committed crimes -- and of all these you have been proved guilty by the ingenious arrangement invoked by the learned recorder of my spoken word -- which render you liable to hanging, slicing, pressing, boiling, roasting, grilling, freezing, vatting, racking, twisting, drawing, compressing, inflating, rending, spiking, gouging, limb-tying, piecemeal-pruning and a variety of less tersely describable discomforts with which the time of this court need not be taken up. The important consideration is, in what order are we to proceed and when, if ever, are we to stop?
8. The Master was a retired pure mathematician who had no pretensions towards social ease. Wearing a full-length gown, he stood glumly in the centre of the room while we milled around him in our short gowns. Throwing a glass of sherry down my throat and plucking another from a passing silver platter, I assessed him as a nonentity and was duly rewarded for my acumen by finding out, twenty years later, that he had been on the committee which approved the funds for the first Manchester computer just after World War II.
9. No, I said to him, look, I said, can you remind me-- what is the essential thing we're supposed to be in it for?-- the ideological nub of the matter? Is it power to the workers; is it the means of production, distribution and exchange; is it each according to his needs; is it the expropriation of the expropriators? Know what he said? Historical inevitability! Historical inevitability! You're joking, I said. Pull the other one, it's got bells on. No you'll have to do better than that.
10. He's a Blockhead who wants a proof of what he can't Perceive, And he's a Fool who tries to make such a Blockhead believe.