“No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.”

One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural.

I don’t think we are here for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating a good lunch.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

There are many people of color who are very talented.

Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.

You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.

Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?

Nothing is so good for an ignorant man as silence; and if he was sensible of this he would not be ignorant.

He who is virtuous is wise; and he who is wise is good; and he who is good is happy.

The sign of a person who has had an education is good manners.

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

Beware of confining yourself to a particular belief and denying all else, for much good would elude you – indeed, the knowledge of reality would elude you. Be in yourself a matter for all forms of belief, for God is too vast and tremendous to be restricted to one belief rather than another.

A great man’s greatest good luck is to die at the right time.

If parts are always changing, the whole remains the same. A dead good man is replaced by a good man, a dead bad man is replaced by a bad man. While the whole remains the same, every day is different.

Reggae is music of love. It has joy and pain, but it feels good.