“Let the pleasure of doodling led us to writing as decoration rather than to the peculiarly abstract sort of representation it inclines towards: the making of signs to look through rather than at.”

“We realize that anything can be everything and each is also its opposite-then the image of zero's perfect ring shines before us.”

“The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.”

“True, they (numbers) are our invention and we have free will: but only to act compatibly with the world we've made.”

“For anything with a name(and zero had so many) surely existed......Yet how could what doesn't exist, exist?”

“Those wonderful coincidences of sound and sense between one language and another were also at work, giving each new term an alluring resonance.”

“Just as the rag doll wanted to be an eagle, the donkey a lion and the monkey a queen, the zero put on airs and pretended to be a digit.”