Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.

Politics, as any observer of the modern world knows, is the enemy of economics, everywhere and always.

I tell you, with complex numbers you can do anything.

The more depressed and maladjusted you are, the more likely it is that you are seeing things right, with minimal bias

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.

I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going.

Asked if Stalin was an antisemite, Robert Conquest replied: Yes, but it hardly noticed. He was broadly and generously anti-human.