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Marooned in Vienna, Olga Taussky found no job. But Hahn and Menger decided to do something about it. They organized a series of public lectures on science. The entrance fees were hefty—roughly in the same price range as opera tickets. With the proceeds, the two mathematicians were able to finance a stipend for their friend and colleague Olga Taussky.

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 230)

Johnny understood everything at first try. There was nobody in the world who could think any faster than he. And what he had just realized, in a blinding flash, was that Gödel’s discovery had totally exploded his prior worldview. All at once, von Neumann understood that there exist true mathematical statements that cannot be derived by formal means from a set of axioms.

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 222)

It is reputed that one time, when Einstein had just given a talk on a daring new idea, the teenage prodigy blurted out, in front of the entire lecture hall, “Was Herr Einstein gesagt hat ist nicht so blöd.” (“What Mr. Einstein just said is not so foolish.”)

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 203)

Now forty years old, Wittgenstein returned for a short while to Cambridge and at long last earned his doctorate in philosophy. For his PhD thesis, he submitted the now world-famous Tractatus. His examiners were Professors Russell and Moore, his old friends from the prewar years. The oral defense seemed like a farce to all three, and it was brief. As the story goes, Wittgenstein got up after a few minutes, patronizingly patted the shoulders of his examiners, and said: “Don’t worry, you’ll never understand it.”

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 135)

“Logic therefore does not say anything about the world; it only has to do with the way in which I talk about the world.”

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 132)

Lieutenant Wittgenstein finished writing his Logico-Philosophical Treatise. He summed up the meaning of this work in his preface: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. “The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think on both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense.”

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 123 - 124)

Russell’s friend G. E. Moore (1873–1958), also became convinced of Wittgenstein’s immense talent. Moore’s reason: “Because Wittgenstein always looks frightfully puzzled during my lectures, but nobody else does.”

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 122)

In Neurath’s view, the end of the war and the subsequent November Revolution in Germany offered a splendid opportunity to get full socialization underway. The main job had already been done, he claimed: now all that was needed was to turn the centrally planned war economy, which was already in place, into a system that was geared to peacetime needs.

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 85 - 86)

In August 1918, the new museum in Leipzig proudly opened its first exhibition. It was also its last. The topic of the exhibition was the economic blockade imposed by the enemy on Germany and Austria. And indeed, the blockade took its toll. The empires of Germany and Austria collapsed, and the museum was shut down.

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 85)

It proved too hard, however, for Olga, with her inability to see, to raise Otto’s little son, and so the boy was sent to a children’s home and grew up mostly there. During the first ten years of his life, he hardly set eyes on his hyperactive father.

— Exact thinking in demented times by Karl Sigmund (Page 84)