John Allen Paulos

Quotes

1. Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify.

   p. 45

2. 

   You can only predict things after they’ve happened.

   p. 7

3. 

   Two dangers threaten the world—order and disorder.

   p. 123

4. 

   Rigid distinctions between the deep and the shallow are generally themselves quite superficial.

   p. 169

5. 

   Always be smart; seldom be certain.

   p. 201

6. 

   One can and should debate whether the tests in question are appropriate for the purposes at hand, but one shouldn’t be surprised when normal curves behave normally.

   p. 61

7. 

   It’s time to let the secret out: mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us.

   p. 3

8. 

   Almost any bunkum has some partial validity, and we regularly read into the confusing mess what we want to see.

   p. 202

9. 

   There is a fine line between public expressions of faith and aggressive declarations thereof, and religious tolerance is inversely proportional to the latter.

   p. 198

10. 

    Gullible citizens are a demagogue’s dream.

    p. 165

11. 

    Even the most superficial of a newspaper reveals an important aspect of human psychology: our preoccupation with the short term.

    p. 96

12. 

    The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrology columns seem insightful by comparison.

    p. 173