Source: 1960s, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, 1968, p. 142
“The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.”
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
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Douglas Adams 317
English writer and humorist 1952–2001Related quotes

Fourth Lecture, p. 70.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)
Context: People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.

Letter to Hugo Boxel (Oct. 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
Context: If I had as clear an idea of ghosts, as I have of a triangle or a circle, I should not in the least hesitate to affirm that they had been created by God; but as the idea I possess of them is just like the ideas, which my imagination forms of harpies, gryphons, hydras, &c., I cannot consider them as anything but dreams, which differ from God as totally as that which is not differs from that which is.<!--pp. 382-383

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”
The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May 1982), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 972

The Ten Suggestions http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20130602a.htm. Speech given at Baccalaureate Ceremony at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, June 2, 2013.

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism