John Forbes Nash

“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.”

“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.”

“It has had a tremendous impact on my life, more than on the life of most Prize winners, because I was in an unusual situation. I was unemployed at the time. I was in good health, but I had reached the age of 66 and beginning to get social security, but I didn't have much of that. I had many years of unemployment before me.”

“You could see how money is different all of a sudden in Italy when they had the lire and now they have the euro. So they, in a revolutionary way, have gone from bad money to good money comparatively. But what about the rest of the world?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was the most important person of the world, and people like the Pope would be just like enemies, who would try to put me down in some way or another, or the president. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering.”

“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 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.”

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

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

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

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“Of course, the American education system is very inefficient in many ways compared to other countries in Europe or Japan, but it works in such a way that at least the few people who are going onto unusual careers and science can manage to get into that, even though they go through an earlier stage that doesn't give them much.”

“Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person.”