I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health.

I did have strange ideas during certain periods of time.

I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959.

I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research.

I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition... Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

It's almost as if a demon might have passed from one host to another.

As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly, and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to 'Non-Cooperative Games,' also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties.

I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That's the trend.

I can see there's a connection between not following normal thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.

I don't think exactly like a professional economist. I think about economics and economic ideas, but somewhat like an outsider.

I know that if I could really understand mental illness, then it would be appropriate to make a big career shift. I would become a therapist and a leader in terms of mental illness. But I'm not in the position.

I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy, as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.

I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also. People don't develop a mental illness because they are in the happiest of situations, usually. One doctor observed that it was rare when people were rich to become schizophrenic. If they were poor or didn't have too much money, then it was more likely.

I went to M.I.T. in the summer of 1951 as a 'C.L.E. Moore Instructor.' I had been an instructor at Princeton for one year after obtaining my degree in 1950. It seemed desirable more for personal and social reasons than academic ones to accept the higher-paying instructorship at M.I.T.

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium, and symptoms of schizophrenia.

If things are not so good, you may be one to imagine something better. For me, I was able to imagine myself as in a role of greater importance than I would seem to be ordinarily.

In a dream it's typical not to be rational.

In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

The dollar used to be a gold standard currency. And the dollar is really good in the last century, I mean in the 19th century.

The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.

There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers.

The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.

I'd like to do policy and I'd like to do philosophy, I'd like to be able to get into the depth, into the meat of the argument - that's the kind of stuff I want to do.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him.

A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.

If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.

One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?

Given the difficulty of resisting such temptations over the longer run, a proper concern for the welfare of congressional souls may well be the ultimate argument in favor of term limitations.

It depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda.

The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.

I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

It's all very boring to say that we get along great and all that and sometimes we mock up come aggravation to make it interesting but the truth of it is that we get along so well we've never had an argument.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.