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Piergiorgio Odifreddi Quotes
born 1950 Italy
Piergiorgio Odifreddi (born 13 July 1950) is an Italian mathematician, logician, scholar of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.
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Mathematicians discover more things in the heavens of mathematics than philosophers dream of on Earth.
Art and mathematics are simply two sides of the same lithography.
Galileo Galilei was the greatest writer in Italian literature: that's not me saying it, it's Italo Calvino.
You can't have your cake and eat it too – that is, you can't embrace a faith for the blessed poor in spirit and at the same time claim not to be one of them.
If I had to convince someone not to believe, I would tell them to read the Bible… but to read it carefully.
You know what philosophers are like – their schools are like comets: a bright head followed by a tail of debris.
I find it less shameful to be descended from an ape than from someone who uses their intelligence to obscure the truth.
Of course, this is not to say that we should lump everything together, although in the twentieth century, the Catholic Church did manage to reach an agreement on each of these lumps.
If we consider that people once knew which angels pulled the planets or which deities caused floods, we can say that today, God has been relegated to the beginnings of the universe, and it is no coincidence that the Pope spoke about this.
In essence, his (of Erwin Schrödinger) teaching can therefore be traced back to the linguistic observation that a certain noun has no plural: more specifically, that as long as there are two cultures, there will be no Culture, but only half-cultures.
Aristotelian categories [were] divided into 'substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, being, having, acting and being acted upon'.
'Christ' is the transliteration of the Greek term christos, meaning 'anointed', chosen by the Septuagint Bible to translate the Hebrew term mashiah, meaning 'messiah', which in the Old Testament referred to the one who was to come and restore the kingdom of Israel.
Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, are based on sacred books aimed at illiterate communities of shepherds.
We are all atheists when it comes to almost all religions. [...] Some people, like me, are atheists with regard to all religions, and some people are atheists with regard to all religions except one.
Leopardi once said that children can find everything in nothing, but adults cannot find anything in everything. Depending on how you look at them, paradoxes are either fragments of nothingness in which you can find everything, or visions of everything in which you can find nothing.
In Italy, there has never been a ruling political class that was atheist; perhaps the most secular figure was Bettino Craxi, although it was he who reinstated the Concordat with the Church.
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