Alonzo Church Quotes

#1. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.

Alonzo Church

#2. It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most populous class of planet in our solar system and we have never sent a mission to this class.

Alan Stern

#3. You're wondering whether this is a good idea. Because you're smart and you see right through me, but you can't help but want this anyway.

Meredith Wild

#4. Tell me what he was like as a baby."
"Why, Margaret, you must not be hurt, but he was much prettier than you were. I remember, when I first saw you in Dixon's arms, I said, 'Dear, what an ugly little thing!

Elizabeth Gaskell

#5. Being a mom has made me so tired. And so happy.

Tina Fey

#6. The only thing that might have annoyed some mathematicians was the presumption of assuming that maybe the axiom of choice could fail, and that we should look into contrary assumptions.

Alonzo Church

#7. We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#8. I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are very hard reading.

Alonzo Church

#9. I don't actually sit down and write, but I just have a lot of different ideas about films and making movies.

Obie Trice

#10. Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

Alonzo Church

#11. I hate labels, and I wear no labels. When a man has to put something around his neck and say I am, he isn't.

Pearl Bailey

#12. Whoever is the cause of another becoming powerful, is ruined himself.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#13. As for sticking strictly to presently known science, I will simply point out that we have already experienced at least two major revolutions in science in this century alone.

Stanley Schmidt

#14. Never had any mathematical conversations with anybody, because there was nobody else in my field.

Alonzo Church