“I believe in God, but I don't think you have to go crazy to prove it.”
Source: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
“I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you whether they liked you or not.”
Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 4, “Whence Innumeracy?” (p. 99)
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John Allen Paulos 48
American mathematician 1945Related quotes
"Good and Bad Reasons for Believing" [open letter to his daughter]
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
“Critics, you have been so kind,
I would not have you think me blind”
Alfred Noyes
(1880–1958) English poet
Apologia
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), Forest of Wild Thyme
Context: Critics, you have been so kind,
I would not have you think me blind
To all the wisdom that you preach;
Yet before I strictlier run
In straiter lines of chiselled speech,
Give me one more hour, just one
Hour to hunt the fairy gleam
That flutters through this childish dream.
John Bodkin Adams
(1899–1983) general practitionar, fraudster and suspected serial killer
To police on being charged.
Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Variant transcription from "Death of a Genius" in Life Magazine: "Certainly there are things worth believing. I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can't. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a leap—call it intuition or what you will—and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap."
Unsourced variant: "The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you do not know how or why. All great discoveries are made in this way." The earliest published version of this variant appears to be The Human Side of Scientists by Ralph Edward Oesper (1975), p. 58 http://books.google.com/books?id=-J0cAQAAIAAJ&q=%22solution+comes+to+you+and+you+do+not+know%22&dq=%22solution+comes+to+you+and+you+do+not+know%22&hl=en, but no source is provided, and the similarity to the "Life Magazine" quote above suggests it's likely a misquote.
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 136
Aron Ra
(1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast
Patheos, The Cow http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/01/22/the-cow/ (January 22, 2016)