“I call it the law of the instrument , and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

There is nothing more inspiring than having a mind unfold before you. Let people teach who have a calling. It is never just a job.

A problem is something you can do something about. If you can’t do something about it, then it’s not a problem, it’s a predicament. That means it’s something that must be coped with, endured.

Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject… Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.

The price of training is always a certain trained incapacity: the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.

A philosophy which speaks, even indirectly, only to philosophers is no philosophy at all; and I think the same is true if it speaks only to scientists, or only to jurists, or priests, or any other special class.

In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist.

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, “What would the world be like if it were true?”

The operationist asks, “What would we have to do to come to believe it?” For the pragmatist the question is, “What would we do if did believe it?”

We are forever asking Nature whether it has stopped beating its wife.

Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naïveté of the mathematician himself.

It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.

Experience is of particulars only.

The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.

We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization.

A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.

When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the ‘National Geographic’ covers a project, it communicates about plants and fish and underwater technology to more than 10 million people.

Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities – political, commercial, sociological, scientific – of the times in which I have lived.

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased.

The citation for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry reads, ‘for contribution to the knowledge of electronic structures and geometry of molecules, especially free radicals,’ and therefore implies that the Prize has been awarded for a long series of studies extending practically over my whole scientific life.

As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.

I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.