Johnny Von Neumann Quotes & Sayings

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, 'with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.' — Enrico Fermi

It's not that fact of him telling me he's not going to kill me that assures me I've got some time to breathe. Predo could look me in the eye and tell me whiskey's good and cigarettes are better and I'd still need a drink and a Lucky to believe he's not lying. The man breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth-telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned.
Stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons, Dexter Predo will be in no danger of revealing the truth. Living so far beyond its borders. — Charlie Huston

I'm still exploring in a lot of ways. I don't know myself completely. — Leonardo DiCaprio

Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere. — Gian-Carlo Rota

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer. — Paul R. Halmos

Since the Antarctic palms of the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. — Elizabeth Kolbert

I used to date a girl from Buffalo. Why can't I meet a girl with normal parents? — Rodney Dangerfield

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars. — E. M. Forster

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over. — Freeman Dyson

It's a universal law that if you unscrew or unbolt more than 10 parts from any machine that there is only a 3% chance that it will ever go back together again and work. — Conrad Cooper

Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone, then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. — Philip K. Dick

Discover. Read. Learn. — Lailah Gifty Akita

My heart is broken, broken in a way that will never be healed, broken in a way that feels like it's going to kill me, too, right here on this stupid, freezing beach — Patrick Ness

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate. — Odilon Redon

Faithful to the cause of Prohibition - She hath done what she could — Carrie Nation