The Prisoner was the ultimate cult hit: a TV series about a secret agent who is kidnapped and held captive in the mysterious village ... He is Number 6, and from the village there is no escape: ‘I am not a number; I am a free man’. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You IV: Me, Myself & I, BBC 2017
Imagine that all of you are in Hades and I am the devil. I make the following proposition, I say: I’ve written down a positive integer on a slip of paper, a whole number ... Every day you’re allowed one guess as to what that number is … Professor Raymond Smullyan
The common things that drive you and me nuts … Ranked highest: hidden fees. Numbers Game: What Drives You Crazy? National Geographic 2013
58% of commuting workers experience road rage. ibid.
Almost 75% of people in America are stressed out at their work. ibid.
Biggest pet peeve in the office: office loud talker. ibid.
One study suggests women have a better capacity for censoring their anger responses than men. ibid.
Expressing anger in a reasonable way is healthy. ibid.
Cheaters cause us outrage. ibid.
Cheating is contagious. ibid.
I am ill at these numbers. William Shakespeare, Hamlet II ii 119
There is diversity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance or death. William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor V i 3
In the Bible the number seven always stands for fullness. It stands for the Pope’s abundance and almightiness. At pontifical mass, there are always seven candles. Six, by contracts, signifies incompleteness. Vatican radio, cited Vatican: Hidden World
He also saw that a very great number – in fact, the majority of the people – lived on the verge of want; and that a smaller and still very large number lived lives of semi-starvation from the cradle to the grave; while a yet smaller but still very great number actually died of hunger, or, maddened by privation, killed themselves and their children in order to put a period to their misery. Robert Tressell, The Raged Trousered Philanthropist
They were numerically outnumbered. Garry Birtles, football commentary
It has all the signs of the sweetest job ever. But you’ve got to get those numbers. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square 1979 starring Richard Jordan & Oliver Tobias & David Niven & Gloria Grahame & Richard Johnson & Michael Angelis & Dicken Ashworth & Brian Croucher & Elke Sommer & Derek Deadman et al, Niven
Algorithms define our lives … An enormous efficiency operation is being conducted, taking decision-making away from humans and handing them over to the rules and laws of the computer. But what are we surrendering to? What does the world look like when algorithms determine our personal future? Slave to the Algorithm, 2018
The Islamic Golden Age: the arts and sciences flourished … We still count using an Arabic numbering system. Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing II: Words on a Page, BBC 2020
Kabbalists – and for them the secret of the universe is numbers. James Burke, Connections s3e8: Fire from the Sky, BBC 1997
All human judgment would be removed and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers; they gave up on the idea they could understand the human mind and cure it; instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings. Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
More than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder. ibid.
A scientific model of ourselves as simplified robots, rational calculated beings whose behaviour and even feelings could be analysed and managed by numbers. But what resulted was the very opposite of freedom: the numbers took on a power of their own which began to create new forms of control, greater inequalities and a return to a rigid class structure based on the power of money. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot
Once public servants were set performance targets they could achieve them in any way they wanted; the old bureaucratic rules could be thrown away and they would become heroic entrepreneurs. ibid.
What the psychiatrists had discovered was that an objective system based on numbers had led them into a trap: the numbers had imposed their own logic. ibid.
James Buchanan, economist: He argued that politicians just like civil servants were hypocrites; the idea they promoted that they were serving the public was a fiction. In reality they too followed their self-interests. ibid.
But report after report came out which revealed that this inventive gaming of the system was now endemic throughout the public services. What was supposed to be a rational system was instead creating a strange world in which no-one knew whether to believe the numbers or not. ibid.
A powerful system of control: but the numbers were also having as strange and perverse effect on New Labour’s vision of a freer and more open Britain. They were in fact creating a more rigid and stratified society. At the heart of this was education and league tables for schools. The tables showed parents which were the best performing schools and which were the worst ones. ibid.
Rich parents moved in the areas of the best schools which then caused house prices to spiral keeping the poor out. ibid.