Ivar Ekeland

“What is needed is courage: it is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself.”

“Well, it has been a long time since manna last fallen from heaven. We cannot live alone; we rely on others to produce the stuff of our material and intellectual life, and we have to organize society so that its members will cooperate toward the common good.”

“Power is no linger seen as inheriting its legitimacy from some divine authority; it is a mere convention which we adhere to because we are born and educated into it, and because we see others conform to it. Its strength lies in the fact that we believe that others believe in it: power is no more than the illusion of power. The exercise of power is a constant fight to keep up appearances.”

“The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills.”

“The moment when the scientists became engineers was a historical turning point.”

“The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology.”

“In the struggle for life, or in the struggle for power, there is no reason why their victory would make the world better than it was. There is no invisible hand guiding these processes, dealing out victory to the most deserving. Chance is their leader.”

“An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory.”

“Many great failures and many great successes are due to chance and not to human folly or ingenuity.”

“Chaos cuts with two edges. We have seen how it is impossible to retrieve past history from current observations. We will now show that it is impossible to predict future states from the current observations.”

“If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well.”

“The transition from integrable to non integrable systems is quiet interesting to observe.”

“It is a testimony to the power of education that classical mechanics could operate for so long under a mistaken conception. Teaching and research concentrated on integrable systems, each feeding the other, until in the end we had no longer the tools nor the interest for studying nonintegrable systems.”

“Nowadays, however, we are much more aware of the fact that the best proof in the world is worth no more than its premises: every scientific theory is transitory and provisional, in wait for a better one, and accepted only as long as the experimental results conform to its predictions.”

“So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance.”

“The world is full, at every scale, and every scale ignores the higher and lower ones.”

“We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own.”

“The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this might be the case.”