Martin Gardner Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-and-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

Martin Gardner
The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

Martin Gardner
Almost all scientists believe that as their knowledge increases, their sense of wonder also grows. The scientist sees a flower, said physicist John Tyndall, "with a wonder superadded."

Martin Gardner
In physics and chemistry, like all other branches of science, there is never a sharp line separating pseudo-scientific speculation from the theories of competent men.

Martin Gardner
Modem science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the explored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.

Martin Gardner
The healthy side of the black-hole craze is that it reminds us of how little science knows, and how vast is the realm about which science knows nothing.

Martin Gardner
As Bertrand Russell once wrote, two plus two is four even in the interior of the sun.

Martin Gardner
The primes...[are] exasperating, unruly integers that refuse to be divided... by any integers except themselves and one.

Martin Gardner
Our entire universe may slowly stop expanding, go into a contracting phase, and finally disappear into a black hole, like an acrobatic elephant jumping into its anus.

Martin Gardner
Mathematicians have a habit of studying, just for the fun of it, things that seem utterly useless; then centuries later their studies turn out to have enormous scientific value.

Martin Gardner
Let the Bible be the Bible. It's not about science. It's not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.

Martin Gardner
It should be kept clearly in mind that, when a scientist speaks of a law, he is simply referring to a description of an observed regularity. It may be accurate, it may be faulty. If it is not accurate, the scientist, not nature, is to blame.

Martin Gardner
There are, and always have been, destructive pseudo-scientific notions linked to race and religion; these are the most widespread and damaging. Hopefully, educated people can succeed in shedding light into these areas of prejudice and ignorance, for as Voltaire once said: "Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities."

Martin Gardner
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

Martin Gardner
Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.

Martin Gardner
Ever since I was a boy, I've been fascinated by crazy science and such things as perpetual motion machines and logical paradoxes. I've always enjoyed keeping up with those ideas. I suppose I didn't get into it seriously until I wrote my first book, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I was influenced by the Dianetics movement, now called Scientology, which was then promoted by John Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction. I was astonished at how rapidly the thing had become a cult.

Martin Gardner
If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is How should I know? … I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

Martin Gardner
Mathemagical mathematics combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick.

Martin Gardner
As I have often said, electrons and gerbils don't cheat. People do.

Martin Gardner
Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine - in fact one shudders to imagine - a child of today reading and enjoying it.

Martin Gardner
Debunking bad science should be constant obligation of the science community, even if it takes time away from serious research or seems to be a losing battle. One takes comfort from the fact there is no Gresham's laws in science. In the long run, good science drives out bad.

Martin Gardner
In many cases a dull proof can be supplemented by a geometric analogue so simple and beautiful that the truth of a theorem is almost seen at a glance.

Martin Gardner
The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.

Martin Gardner
A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.

Martin Gardner
The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.

Martin Gardner
If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime.

Martin Gardner
If God creates a world of particles and waves, dancing in obedience to mathematical and physical laws, who are we to say that he cannot make use of those laws to cover the surface of a small planet with living creatures?

Martin Gardner
I've never made a discovery myself, unless by accident. If you write glibly, you fool people. When I first met Asimov, I asked him if he was a professor at Boston University. He said no and … asked me where I got my Ph. D. I said I didn't have one and he looked startled. "You mean you're in the same racket I am," he said, "you just read books by the professors and rewrite them?" That's really what I do.

Martin Gardner
Ideologues of all persuasions think they know how the economy will respond to the Administration's strange mixture of Lafferism and monetarism. Indeed, their self-confidence is so vast, and their ability to rationalize so crafty, that one cannot imagine a scenario for the next few years, that they would regard as falsifying their dogma. The failure of any prediction can always be blamed on quirky political decisions or unforeseen historical events.

Martin Gardner