Willard Van Orman Quine Quotes

A sheep in sheep's clothing.

I myself had to grow a longer beard and Afghan clothes. I was in danger of being kidnapped by smugglers, though I didn't know it at the time.

I would wear the blue overalls of the fieldworker and often wore round, rimless glasses known as Mazzawati teaglasses. I had a car, and I wore a chauffeur's cap with my overalls. The pose of chauffeur was convenient because I could travel under the pretext of driving my master's car.

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.

When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.

Putting on someone else's clothes is like putting on a mask.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

You know, I've got a confession to make myself. I'm not really a priest, I've just got my shirt on backwards.

Never wear a hat and sunglasses at the same time, because it looks like you're wearing a disguise.

Beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Mathematics, in its widest significance, is the development of all types of formal, necessary, deductive reasoning.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

Hee that makes himself a sheep, shall be eat by the wolfe.

Poincaré was a vigorous opponent of the theory that all mathematics can be rewritten in terms of the most elementary notions of classical logic; something more than logic, he believed, makes mathematics what it is.

[On Cantor's work:] The finest product of mathematical genius and one of the supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity.

The ravening wolves are amongst us, from our own membership, and they, more than any others, are clothed in sheep's clothing, because they wear the habiliments of the priesthood…We should be careful of them.

For mathematics, even to the logical forms in which it moves, is entirely dependent on the concept of natural number.

There some trifles well habited, as there are some fools well clothed.

The ultimate disguise is nothing. Nudity.

Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.