John Allen Paulos

"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 prelimina…"

"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 e…"

"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."

"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 agn…"

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

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

"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."

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