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  2. A student who changes the course of history is probably taking an exam.

  3. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

  4. Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion; rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.

  5. According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.

  6. All probabilities are 50%. Either a thing will happen or it won't.

  7. All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

  8. An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

  9. An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

 10. An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

 11. Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

 12. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

 13. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

 14. Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

 15. Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

 16. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

 17. Beware the man of one book.

 18. Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing as division.

 19. Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

 20. Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.

 21. Data without generalization is just gossip.

 22. Discovery is seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.

 23. Don't remember what you can infer.

 24. Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

 25. Every dogma must have its day.

 26. Facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are delightful... Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

 27. First Rule of History: History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.

 28. For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

 29. Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

 30. Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab: Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.

 31. History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion -- i.e., none to speak of.

 32. History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

 33. Horngren's Observation: Among economists, the real world is often a special case.

 34. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind.

 35. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

 36. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has

 37. I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.

 38. I think, therefore I am.

 39. If you find an error, if you know the origin of one of the unattributed quotes, or if you have an aphorism of your own, please make a contribution.

 40. Ignorance is the mother of devotion.

 41. I'm still an atheist, thank God.

 42. Imagination is more important than knowledge.

 43. In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

 44. In science as in love, too much concentration on technique can often lead to impotence.

 45. Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?

 46. It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

 47. It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.

 48. It is bad luck to be superstitious.

 49. It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.

 50. It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

 51. Logic is like the sword -- those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

 52. Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

 53. Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.

 54. Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.

 55. My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts!

 56. My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

 57. Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.

 58. No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern; no idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

 59. Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

 60. Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.

 61. Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be nullified on behalf of a single petitioner, admittedly unworthy.

 62. Prophecy is many times the principal cause of the events foretold.

 63. Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.

 64. Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.

 65. Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.

 66. Religion is the opium of the masses.

 67. Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

 68. Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!

 69. Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

 70. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

 71. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

 72. Strong words are required for weak principles.

 73. Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

 74. That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art.

 75. The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time.

 76. The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.

 77. The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.

 78. The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray.

 79. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

 80. The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

 81. The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.

 82. The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

 83. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

 84. The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

 85. The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

 86. The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.

 87. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

 88. The truth is more important than the facts.

 89. The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

 90. Theft from a single author is plagiarism. Theft from two is comparative study. Theft from three or more is research.

 91. There are no errors in this book, except this one.

 92. There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

 93. There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't.

 94. There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

 95. There is only one blasphemy, and that is the refusal to experience joy.

 96. There's always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.

 97. This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't.

 98. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 99. Time is God's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

100. To generalize is to be an idiot.

101. Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.

102. Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.

103. Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

104. We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

105. What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

106. Wonder, rather than doubt, is the root of knowledge.