People From Denver

"There is a God and I'm going to serve him for the rest of my life."

"Faith brings peace. Faith brings joy."

"It's hard to be desperate, when you are dead."

"These hands belong to Rachel Joy Scott and will someday touch millions of people's hearts."

"It's not about that for me. I'm not trying to go out there and convert people. I just want to be an example. I want to live my life for God, and let other people take from that whatever they want."

"I can see him. I know that God is real. I know it in my heart. You can only believe in what you know to be true. You know your own truth. I know mine. Everyone should be able to find that within themselves."

"Rachel Scott, good to meet you, friend."

"It's like I have a heavy heart and this burden upon my back...but I don't know what ti is. There is something in me that makes me want to cry...and I don't even know what it is. Things have definitely changed. Last week was so hard...besides missing Breakthru...I lost all of my friends at school. Now that I have begun to "walk my talk," they make fun of me. I don't even know what I have done. I don't really have to say anything, and they turn me away. I was talking to [REDACTED] and I realized so much. I know what they're thinking every time I make a decision to resist temptation and follow God. They talk behind my back and call me "the preacher's church-going girl." Now [REDACTED] loves to drink. I used to drink with her some, but since I've stopped she thinks that I am such a loser, and that God is just a phase for me. I have no more personal friends at school. But you know what? I am not going to apologize for speaking the name of Jesus, I am not going to justify my faith to them, and I am not going to hide the light that God has put me into. If I have to sacrifice everything... I will. I will take it. If my friends have to become my enemies for me to be with my best friend Jesus, then that’s fine with me. I always knew that being a Christian is having enemies, but I never thought that my "friends" were going to be those enemies. It's all good, I'm just a loner now at school. I just wish that someone from Breakthru went to my school."

"I am sure that my codes of life may be very different from yours, but how do you know that trust, compassion, and beauty will not make this world a better place to be in and this life a better one to live? My codes may seem like a fantasy that can never be reached, but test them for yourself, and see the kind of effect they have in the lives of people around you. You just may start a chain reaction."

"Tagovailoa trying to.. make up for it. Fires to the endzone, TOUCHDOWN! ALABAMA WINS! The Crimson Tide will not be denied! True freshman, to true freshman: Tagovailoa to DeVonta Smith. Alabama breaks Georgia hearts. Nick Saban back on the summit, where he has caught "The Bear" with his sixth national championship. 'Bama has won 5 in nine years."

"Too often, this concern for the big picture is simply obscurantist and is put forward by people who prefer vagueness and mystery to (partial) answers. Vagueness is at times necessary and mystery is never in short supply, but I don’t think they’re anything to worship. Genuine science and mathematical precision are more intriguing than are the “facts” published in supermarket tabloids or a romantic innumeracy which fosters credulity, stunts skepticism, and dulls one to real imponderables."

"There is no such thing as free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion."

"Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most."

"Bad things happen periodically, and they’re going to happen to somebody. Why not you?"

"Any bit of nonsense can be computerized—astrology, biorhythms, the I Ching—but that doesn’t make the nonsense any more valid."

"Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them."

"I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you whether they liked you or not."

"If we’re not keenly aware of the choices we’re making, we’re not likely to work for better ones."

"The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place."

"There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe."

"There surely is something to these terms, but too often they’re the result of minds intent on discovering meaning where there is only probability."

"A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence."

"All art, in fact, has these two aspects: its content and its frame (or setting), which sets it apart from nonart and which says of itself, “This is not an everyday sort of communication. This is unreal.”"

"It’s time to let the secret out: mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us."

"Innumerate people characteristically have a strong tendency to personalize—to be misled by their own experiences, or by the media’s focus on individuals and drama."

"To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both eyes, is easier than to think."

"After all, one must have some grasp of logic even to recognize a non sequitur."

"It’s always healthy to recognize facts."

"The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe."

"The necessity of this psychic stepping back (or up) to the metalevel is probably what is meant when people say that a sense of perspective is needed for an appreciation of humor. It also explains why dogmatists, idealogues, and others with one-track minds are often notoriously humorless."

"The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral or law-abiding than they. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and I suspect whatever average distance there is along the nebulous dimension of morality has the opposite algebraic sign."

"Claiming that a holy book’s claims are undeniable because the book itself claims them to be is convincing only to the convinced."

"Confirmation of a person’s unreliable statement by another unreliable person makes the statement even less reliable."

"The whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle having occurred."

"I’ve argued that the set of standard questions journalists ask and readers want answers should be enlarged. Besides Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How, it should include How many? How likely? What fraction? How does the quantity compare with other quantities? What is its rate of growth, and how does that compare? What about the self-referential aspects of the story? Is there an appropriate degree of complexity in it? Are we looking at the right categories and relations? How much of the story is independent of its reporting? Are we especially vulnerable to the availability error or to anchoring effects? If statistics are presented, how were they obtained? How confident can we be of them? Were they derived from a random sample or from a collection of anecdotes? Does the correlation suggest a causal relationship, or is it merely a coincidence? And do we understand how the people and various pieces of an organization reported upon are connected? What is known about the dynamics of the whole system? Are they stable or do they seem sensitive to tiny perturbations? Are there other ways to tally any figures presented? Do such figures measure what they purport to measure? Is the precision recounted meaningful?"

"It’s become somewhat fashionable to say that religion and science are growing together and are no longer incompatible. This convergence is, in my opinion, illusory. In fact, I don’t believe that any attempt to combine these very disparate bodies of ideas can succeed intellectually."

"There are, of course, innumerable abuses, countless possible misinterpretations, and depressingly many biased studies, but, done right, the process works; it yields knowledge."

"Appreciating humor—even recognizing it—requires human skills of the highest order (level?); no computer comes close to having them."

"There is a fine line between public expressions of faith and aggressive declarations thereof, and religious tolerance is inversely proportional to the latter."

"While not a panacea, candidly recognizing the absence of any good logical arguments for God’s existence, giving up on divine allies and advocates as well as taskmasters and tormentors, and prizing a humane, reasonable, and brave outlook just might help move this world a bit closer to a heaven on earth."

"Always be smart; seldom be certain."

"Together the, two ingredients—a perceived incongruity with a point and an appropriate emotional climate—seem to be both necessary and sufficient for humor."

"Almost any bunkum has some partial validity, and we regularly read into the confusing mess what we want to see."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

"When the law’s on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. And when neither is on your side, pound the table."

"Even the most superficial of a newspaper reveals an important aspect of human psychology: our preoccupation with the short term."

"Two dangers threaten the world—order and disorder."

"In general, any differences between two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes."

"Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify."

"One can and should debate whether the tests in question are appropriate for the purposes at hand, but one shouldn’t be surprised when normal curves behave normally."