Paul Erdős Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Some French socialist said that private property was theft … I say that private property is a nuisance.

Paul Erdős
The SF created us to enjoy our suffering. … The sooner we die, the sooner we defy His plans.

Paul Erdős
Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education.

Paul Erdős
Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack.

Paul Erdős
It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You should also have an open mind at the right time.

Paul Erdős
SF means Supreme Fascist — this would show that God is bad. I don't claim that this is correct, or that God exists, but it is just sort of half a joke. … As a joke I said, "What is the purpose of Life?" "Proof and conjecture, and keep the SF's score low."
Now, the game with the SF is defined as follows:
If you do something bad the SF gets at least two points.
If you don't do something good which you could have done, the SF gets at least one point.
And if nothing — if you are okay, then no one gets any point.
And the aim is to keep the SF's score low.

Paul Erdős
If numbers aren't beautiful, I don't know what is.

Paul Erdős
God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.

Paul Erdős
It's like asking why Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

Paul Erdős
To conclude, a somewhat daunting quote about the prime numbers from someone who was as familiar with them as anyone has ever been: "It will be millions of years before we'll have any understanding, and even then it won't be a complete understanding, because we're up against the infinite."

Paul Erdős
Every human activity, EXCEPT Mathematics, must come to an end.

Paul Erdős
God created two acts of folly. First, He created the Universe in a Big Bang. Second, He was negligent enough to leave behind evidence for this act, in the form of the microwave radiation.

Paul Erdős