“Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.”

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don’t have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.

People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.

Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.

It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

A clone of Einstein wouldn’t be stupid, but he wouldn’t necessarily be any genius, either.

Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.

If scientists don’t play God, who will?

I have been much blessed.

Knowing “why” (an idea) is more important than learning “what” (the fact).

We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.

A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be.

A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be.

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes.

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?

It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.

The lesser we have to care about whether someone is a narcissist or not, the better we will end up improving our private lives.

As Negro voting increased, Congress got an improved sense of hearing.

When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union – like public housing in the United States – look decrepit within a year or two of their construction.