122 Quotes by Leonard Mlodinow

Just as, looking at a Rorschach blot, you might see Madonna and I, a duck-billed platypus, the data we encounter in business, law, medicine, sports, the media, or your child’s third-grade report card can be read in many ways. Yet interpreting the role of chance in an event is not like intepreting a Rorschach blot; there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.

A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.

Unfortunately, in 1861, when he was forty, Buckle caught typhus while traveling in Damascus. Offered the services of a local physician, he refused because the man was French, and so he died.

Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and – as I keep reminding my teenage children – pointing and grunting get you only so far.

1943 Bohr was tipped off by the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that he faced immediate arrest as part of the plan to deport all of Denmark’s Jews.

Pythagoras was a charismatic figure and a genius, but he was also a good self-promoter. In Egypt, he not only learned Egyptian geometry but became the first Greek to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics, and eventually became an Egyptian priest, or the equivalent, initiated into their sacred rites. This gave him access to all their mysteries, even to the secret rooms in their temples.

We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That’s why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.

In 1932, after nineteen years of research, Bartlett published his results.

What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the questions behind the five geometric revolutions of world history. It started with a little scheme hatched by Pythagoras: to employ mathematics as the abstract system of rules that can model the physical universe.