Morris Kline Quotes

The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.

Statistics: the mathematical theory of ignorance.

Universities hire professors the way some men choose wives - they want the ones the others will admire.

A elegantly executed proof is a poem in all but the form in which it is written.

Actually, most mathematics courses do not teach reasoning of any kind. Students are so baffled by the material that they are obliged to memorize in order to pass examinations.

Mathematicians create by acts of insights and intuition. Logic then sanctions the conquests of intuition.

Psychologically, the teaching of abstractions first is wrong. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the concrete must precede the abstract.

There is no rigorous definition of rigor.

A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts.

In brief, the whole world is the totality of mathematically expressible motions of objects in space and time, and the entire universe is a great, harmonious, and mathematically designed machine.

Mathematics is a body of knowledge, but it contains no truths.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

A good expository paper will benefit far more people than most research papers. A good text is worth a thousand of the usual trifles that appear in research journals.