Martin Gardner > Quotes

“There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.”
― 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, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.”
― Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

“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, Aha! Insight

“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

“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.”
― Martin Gardner

“It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.”
― Martin Gardner, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap?”
― Martin Gardner

“I’m not sure why I enjoy debunking. Part of it surely is amusement over the follies of true believers, and [it is] partly because attacking bogus science is a painless way to learn good science. You have to know something about relativity theory, for example, to know where opponents of Einstein go wrong. . . . Another reason for debunking is that bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society.”
― 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

“The rub is that any work of nonsense abounds with so many inviting symbols that you can start with any assumption you please about the author and easily build up an impressive case for it. Consider, for example, the scene in which Alice seizes the end of the White King's pencil and begins scribbling for him. In five minutes one can invent six different interpretations.”
― Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

“Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.”
― Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition

“As I will be saying over and over again in this rambling volume, I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries. What is the difference between something and nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing? Should the something of which the universe is fundamentally composed be regarded as like atoms or be regarded as more like a mind? Or is the substratum best thought of as something neutral: material when structured one way, mental when structured another way? I have no desire even to try to answer such questions. I find nothing absurd about the notion that the external world is the mind of God, nor do I find it repulsive to suppose that God can create a world of substance, utterly unlike ideas in God’s mind or anybody’s mind, that can exist whether God thinks about it or not. How can I, a mere mortal slightly above an ape in intelligence, know what it means to say that something is “created” by God, or “thought” by God? One can play endless metaphysical games with such phrases,3 but I can no more grasp what is behind such questions than my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“University of Chicago is a Baptist school, where atheist professors teach Jewish students about St. Thomas Aquinas.”
― Martin Gardner

“Let us hope that Lysenko's success in Russia will serve for many generations to come as another reminder to the world of how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes.”
― Martin Gardner

“Most mathematics deals with static objects such as circles and triangles and numbers. But the great universe "out there," not made by us, is in a constant state of what Newton called flux. At every microsecond it changes magically into something different. Calculus is the mathematics of change.”
― Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy

“We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains”
― Martin Gardner, El Anticipador y otros cuentos de mente

“My wife and I own a cat we call Eureka, after Dorothy’s cat in the fourth Oz book. In Eureka’s dim mind she must be a kind of polytheist, fed as she is by the two of us, and by neighbors when we take a trip; surrounded on all sides by giant creatures who move about on their hind legs to do things utterly beyond her ken. But we who are her gods have a power of speculation far greater than that of her tiny feline brain.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“at”
― Martin Gardner, My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles

“The Rail Fence Cipher Suppose”
― Martin Gardner, Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing

“Chesterton's topic is nothing less than the fundamental contrast between deductive logic, true of all possible worlds, and inductive logic, capable only of telling us how we may reasonably expect this world to behave. Let us hasten to add that Chesterton's analysis is in full agreement with the views of modern logicians. Perhaps his "test of the imagination" is not strictly accurate--who can "imagine" the four-dimensional constructions of relativity?-but in essence his position is unassailable. Logical and mathematical statements are true by definition. They are "empty tautologies," to use a current phrase, like the impressive maxim that there are always six eggs in half a dozen. Nature, on the other hand, is under no similar constraints. Fortunately, her "weird repetitions," as GK calls them, often conform to surprisingly low-order equations. But as Hume and others before Hume made clear, there is no logical reason why she should behave so politely.”
― Martin Gardner, Great Essays in Science

“XXII”
― Martin Gardner, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was

“The entire counterculture scene of the sixties, with its weird mixture of kinky sex, pot, rock, zen, astrology, obscene language, and fusty anarchist theory, always struck me as a prime example of how quickly angry rebels turn into other-directed conformists of the most extreme sort. After telling everybody over thirty that each person has a right to do his or her own thing, millions of youngsters proceeded to do identical things. Boys let their hair grow to their shoulders. Little girls learned how to shock their grandmothers with four-letter words. Boys and girls alike bought the same records, worshiped the same rock stars. The radicals among them loudly proclaimed their devotion to “participatory democracy,” simultaneously praising Hanoi and plastering their rooms with photos of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

“It is a fortunate and astonishing fact that the fundamental laws of our fantastic fidgety universe are based on relatively simple equations. If it were otherwise, we surely would know less than we know now about how our universe behaves, and Newton and Leibniz would probably never have invented (or discovered?) calculus.”
― Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy

“The notion that relativity physics supports the avoidance of value judgments in anthropology, for example, or a relativism with respect to morals, is absurd. Actually, relativity introduces a whole series of new “absolutes.”
― Martin Gardner, Relativity Simply Explained

“LEWIS CARROLL’S CIPHER”
― Martin Gardner, Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing

“[7] The Shadows Code In the 1930’s a mysterious crime-fighter called the Shadow was the hero of a popular pulp magazine and an even more popular radio show. Dressed all in black, the Shadow could glide unseen through the darkness to battle the forces of evil. Stories about the Shadow, written by Maxwell Grant (pseudonym for the Shadow’s creator, Walter B. Gibson), often contained curious codes. This cipher, from a novelette called The Chain of Death, is one of the best.”
― Martin Gardner, Codes, Ciphers and Secret Writing

“Politicians, real-estate agents, used-car salesmen, and advertising copy-writers are expected to stretch facts in self-serving directions, but scientists who falsify their results are regarded by their peers as committing an inexcusable crime. Yet the sad fact is that the history of science swarms with cases of outright fakery and instances of scientists who unconsciously distorted their work by seeing it through lenses of passionately held beliefs.”
― Martin Gardener

“Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation …. Albert Einstein,
Autobiographical Notes”
― Martin Gardner, Relativity Simply Explained

“My anthology would be incomplete without the chapter on “The Ethics of Elfland” from Orthodoxy.26 In the spirit of Hume, though Hume is never mentioned, Chesterton argues that all natural laws should be looked upon as magic because there is no logical connection between any cause and its effect. Fairy tales, said GK, remind us that the laws of nature have an arbitrary quality in that they could, for all we know, be quite other than what they are. Maybe the regularities of nature, its weird repetitions, as Chesterton called them, are not logically necessary but exist because God, like a small child, is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg.”
― Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener