I used to love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness…. – Stendhal (Henri Beyle), The Life of Henri Brulard

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry. – Eric Bell, The Search for Truth

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes. – Eric T. Bell, The Development of Mathematics