What can I say?
Mathematics is a way not to be wrong, but it isn’t a way not to be wrong about
everything. (Sorry, no refunds!) Wrongness is like original sin; we are born to
it and it remains always with us, and constant vigilance is necessary if we
mean to restrict its sphere of influence over our actions. There is real danger
that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically,
we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to
those things we’re still wrong about. We become like those pious people who,
over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make
them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.
