As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.

The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.

I wrote a great deal during the next ten [early] years,but very little of any importance; there are not more than four or five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.