On Algebra - 'We're a month into it, and I'm planning to start a real protest movement, one to have X and Y removed from the alphabet. Z is also suspect as far as I'm concerned...Damn it! They put a man on the moon; can't they find some way to end the scourge of Algebra?

— Huston Piner

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

— James Joseph Sylvester

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

— Fran Lebowitz

It's only in Algebra that two negatives make a positive.

— Charmaine J. Forde

As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.

— Augustin-Louis Cauchy

So what if I don't learn algebra?''Someday schools will be open again,' Mom said. 'Things will be normal. You need to do your work now for when that happens.''That's never going to happen,' Jon said. 'And even if schools do open up somewhere, they're not going to open up here. There aren't enough people left.' 'We don't know how many people are like us, holed up, making do until times get better.''I bet whoever they are, they aren't studying algebra,' Jon said.

— Susan Beth Pfeffer

I only have one enemy in this world and she can be very complicated. After forty one years, I still haven't figured her out as yet, but I will -trust me- I am still working on a formula for you Algebra.

— Charmaine J. Forde

Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life.Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise.

— Gregory David Roberts

Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, 'I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package.

— Robert Kanigel

It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.

— Dejan Stojanovic