John Allen Paulos Quotes

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

Too often, this concern for the big picture is simply obscurantist and is put forward by people who prefer vagueness and mystery to (partial) answers. Vagueness is at times necessary and mystery is never in short supply, but I don’t think they’re anything to worship. Genuine science and mathematical precision are more intriguing than are the “facts” published in supermarket tabloids or a romantic innumeracy which fosters credulity, stunts skepticism, and dulls one to real imponderables.

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.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

If we’re not keenly aware of the choices we’re making, we’re not likely to work for better ones.

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.

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.

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

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.”

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.

It’s become somewhat fashionable to say that religion and science are growing together and are no longer incompatible. This convergence is, in my opinion, illusory. In fact, I don’t believe that any attempt to combine these very disparate bodies of ideas can succeed intellectually.

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.

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

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

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.