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

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.

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

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.

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

If everybody trusts one another, then the person who didn’t prevail will faithfully execute the decision as if it was their idea.

Life is very, very simple and easy to understand, but we complicate it with the beliefs and ideas that we create.

Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.

Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance. Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth.

All my life I have had a certain idea of France.

I think we brought to the world, the United States anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change.

The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.

I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.