To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a r — Richard Feynman

"[T]he Mayan[s]... had a scheme for predicting... when Venus was a morning... or . ...[T]hey had a rule for... making corrections and... had a very good way of predicting when Venus was coming up. ...Suppose that the professors (the priests in those days) ...were giving a lecture ...to explain ... these wonderful predictions ...He would say, "What were doing is counting the days, just like youre putting nuts in a pod." ...[The students] did not know a quick and tricky way to add 365 x 8. ...These students were learning ...the laws of arithmetic. Something... to us now, because we have public, free, general education, almost everybody has to... learn... by a tricky scheme... The waitress, just an ordinary person, in two minutes does that. How..? ...Shes ...counting ...415 pennies ...then ...287 more ...and telling you how many pennies you would have got if you counted ...beginning to the end. But its highly educated and very trained to... do that... quickly. ...In the 14th century [it was] mathematicians... who could do that."

"There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. … Its a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if youre doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it; other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that youve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can — if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong — to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another."

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."

"And then theres a kind of saying that you dont understand it, meaning "I dont believe it. Its too crazy. Its the kind of thing, Im just... Im not going to accept it."... This kind, I hope youll come along with me, and youll have to accept it, because its the way nature works. If you want to know the way nature works... We looked at it, carefully... Thats the way it looks! You dont like it? Go somewhere else... to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I cant help it! OK? If Im going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to... human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like, and I cannot make it innocent. ...Im not going to simplify it, eh? Im not going to fake it. Im not going to... tell you its something like a ball bearing on a spring. It isnt."

"The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light or you see the thing youre looking at, is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with. Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting, eating his dinner, hasnt any difficulty in making out that what he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that were unable to make that analysis and that idea, have fallen by the wayside through hunger!"

"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you wont believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"