One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

One of the things being in politics has taught me is that men are not a reasoned or reasonable sex.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do chemistry because he thought there would be no jobs for mathematicians.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Law is mind without reason.

He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave.

I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.

If you want to influence people, you want them to accept your suggestions, you don’t say, ‚You don’t know how to use the English language,‘ or ‚How could you make that argument?‘ It will be welcomed much more if you have a gentle touch than if you are aggressive.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

My life is my argument.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

Why there is one body in our System qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the System thought it convenient; and why there is but one body of this kind, I know no reason, but because one was sufficient to warm and enlighten all the rest.

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.

Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

That the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another is a matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Well, we can’t say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

In the beginning of the year 1665, I found the method of approximating series and the rule for reducing any dignity of any binomial into such a series.

Man is the only animal capable of reasoning, though many others possess the faculty of memory and instruction in common with him.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Religious faith, like political belief, should be based on reasoning, on the development of thought and feelings. The two things are inseparable.

In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.