I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and… — John Allen Paulos

There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe.

The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.

Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most.