“You know that it is quite preposterous of you to chase rainbows,” said the sane person to the poet.
“Yet it would be rather beautiful if I did one day manage to catch one,” mused the poet.

All that Eddington and Millikan achieve, when they attempt their preposterous reconciliation of science and theology, is to prove that they themselves, for all their technical skill, are scientists only by trade, not by conviction. They practice science diligently and to some effect, but only in the insensate way in which Blind Tom played the piano. … they can’t get rid of a congenital incredulity. Science, to them, remains a bit strange and shocking. They are somewhat in the position of a Christian clergyman who finds himself unable to purge himself of a suspicion that Jonah, after all, probably did not swallow the whale.

An enthusiasm about psychiatry is preposterous—it shows one just hasn’t grown up; but at the same time, for the psychiatrist to be indifferent toward his work is fatal.

Fields of learning are surrounded ultimately only by illusory boundaries—like the “rooms” in a hall of mirrors.
It is when the illusion is penetrated that progress takes place. … Likewise science cannot be regarded as a thing apart, to be studied, admired or ignored. It is a vital part of our culture, our culture is part of it, it permeates our thinking, and its continued separateness from what is fondly called “the humanities” is a preposterous practical joke on all thinking men.

It is very remarkable that while the words Eternal, Eternity, Forever, are constantly in our mouths, and applied without hesitation, we yet experience considerable difficulty in contemplating any definite term which bears a very large proportion to the brief cycles of our petty chronicles. There are many minds that would not for an instant doubt the God of Nature to have existed from all Eternity, and would yet reject as preposterous the idea of going back a million of years in the History of His Works. Yet what is a million, or a million million, of solar revolutions to an Eternity?

The so-called Marxian dialectic is simply an effort by third-rate men to give an air of profundity to balderdash. Christianity has gone the same way. There are some sound ideas in it, but its advocates always add a lot of preposterous nonsense. The result is theology.

To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allied character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar.

When one considers how hard it is to write a computer program even approaching the intellectual scope of a good paper, and how much greater time and effort have to be put in to make it “almost” formally correct, it is preposterous to claim that mathematics as we practice it is anywhere near formally correct.