John Allen Paulos Quotes

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

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

While not a panacea, candidly recognizing the absence of any good logical arguments for God’s existence, giving up on divine allies and advocates as well as taskmasters and tormentors, and prizing a humane, reasonable, and brave outlook just might help move this world a bit closer to a heaven on earth.

A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence.

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

The whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle having occurred.

The necessity of this psychic stepping back (or up) to the metalevel is probably what is meant when people say that a sense of perspective is needed for an appreciation of humor. It also explains why dogmatists, idealogues, and others with one-track minds are often notoriously humorless.

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 surely is something to these terms, but too often they’re the result of minds intent on discovering meaning where there is only probability.

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.

The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral or law-abiding than they. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and I suspect whatever average distance there is along the nebulous dimension of morality has the opposite algebraic sign.

I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you whether they liked you or not.

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.

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.

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