“One cannot plan for the unexpected.”

I did not feel a particularly strong call to any one subject, but read voraciously and widely and began to find science interesting.

Cambridge was the place for someone from the Colonies or the Dominions to go on to, and it was to the Cavendish Laboratory that one went to do physics.

People who get Nobel prizes aren’t necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.

My father was trained as a saddler, but in fact as a young man worked in his father’s business of rearing and selling cattle, so he grew up in the countryside.

Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.

I like teaching and the contact with young minds keeps one on one’s toes, but increasing responsibilities have forced me to shed much of it in recent years.

The philosophy of the school was quite simple – the bright boys specialised in Latin, the not so bright in science and the rest managed with geography or the like.

The Infinite cannot be measured. The plan of Nature is so immense, but she has no plan, no scheme, but to go on and on forever. What is size, what is time, distance, to the Infinite?

The mind cannot long play the heart’s role.

Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended.

People dont realize that we cannot forecast the future. What we can do is have probabilities of what causes what, but thats as far as we go. And Ive had a very successful career as a forecaster, starting in 1948 forward.

I cannot conceive of a politically feasible solution to this problem which will overdo cutting the deficit, where overdoing means harming the economy. It might be technically possible, but it is not realistic.

Justice is such a fine thing that we cannot pay too dearly for it.

Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.

You cannot play with fire.