John Allen Paulos

When the law’s on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. And when neither is on your side, pound the table.

There are, of course, innumerable abuses, countless possible misinterpretations, and depressingly many biased studies, but, done right, the process works; it yields knowledge.

In general, any differences between two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes.

Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty.

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.

There is no such thing as free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion.

Bad things happen periodically, and they’re going to happen to somebody. Why not you?

Innumerate people characteristically have a strong tendency to personalize—to be misled by their own experiences, or by the media’s focus on individuals and drama.

To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both eyes, is easier than to think.

Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them.