Ivar Ekeland

"What is needed is courage: it is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself."

"The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills."

"So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance."

"If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well."

"Well, it has been a long time since manna last fallen from from heaven. We cannot live alone; we rely on others to produce the stuff of our material and intellectual life, and we have to organize soci…"

"It is a testimony to the power of education that classical mechanics could operate for so long under a mistaken conception. Teaching and research concentrated on integrable systems, each feeding the o…"

"We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own."

"An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory."