John Allen Paulos Quotes

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.

It’s always healthy to recognize facts.

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

The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe.

Appreciating humor—even recognizing it—requires human skills of the highest order (level?); no computer comes close to having them.

Claiming that a holy book’s claims are undeniable because the book itself claims them to be is convincing only to the convinced.

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

Always be smart; seldom be certain.

All art, in fact, has these two aspects: its content and its frame (or setting), which sets it apart from nonart and which says of itself, “This is not an everyday sort of communication. This is unreal.”

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.

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.

Any bit of nonsense can be computerized—astrology, biorhythms, the I Ching—but that doesn’t make the nonsense any more valid.

Humor, since it depends on so many emotional, social, and intellectual facets of human beings, is particularly immune to computer simulation.

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

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