Our faith in Mathematics is not likely to wane if we openly acknowledge that the personalities of even the greatest mathematicians may be as flawed as those of anyone else.

Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.

Theorems are not to mathematics what successful courses are to a meal.

The progress of mathematics can be viewed as progress from the infinite to the finite.

How did he do it? He must be a genius!

Very little mathematics has direct applications - though fortunately most of it has plenty of indirect ones.

Mathematics is the study of analogies between analogies. All science is. Scientists want to show that things that don't look alike are really the same. That is one of their innermost Freudian motivations. In fact, that is what we mean by understanding.