Asimov, Isaac: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'

Bach, Richard: The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice. (One: 1988)

Bacon, Francis: That which a man would prefer to be true he more readily believes. (quod enim mavult homo verum esse, id potius credit, in Novum Organum: 1620)

Bush, George W.: See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (White House Press Release: May 24, 2005)

Eliot, Thomas S: Human kind cannot bear very much reality. (Four Quartets)

Foster, Jodie: Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from.

Galbraith, John Kenneth: Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Gide, André: The love of truth is not the need for certainty and it is really unwise to confuse one with the other. (L'amour de la vérité n'est pas le besoin de certitude et il est bien imprudent de confondre l'un avec l'autre.)

Goldberg, Whoopi: Normal is in the eye of the beholder.

Gumbel, Emil J: It’s impossible that the improbable will never happen. (Il est impossible que l’improbable n’arrive jamais, in Statistics of Extremes, 1958.)

Hobbes, Thomas: For to accuse requires less eloquence (such is man's nature) than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice. (Leviathan: 1651)

Laplace, Pierre-Simon: The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability. (Théorie Analytique des Probabilités: 1812)

Lenin, Vladimir: A lie told often enough becomes the truth. (Widely attributed to Lenin: 1870 – 1924)

Lorenz, Konrad: Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

Macmillan, Harold: To be alive at all involves some risk.

Northrop, Ann: Don’t tolerate me as different. Accept me as part of the spectrum of normalcy.

Tesla, Nikola: Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. (Modern Mechanics and Inventions: 1934)

Wilde, Oscar: Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. (The Death of Lying: 1889)