“There is a tendency of people to try to make you believe only a few people are smart. As a brain surgeon, I know better than that.”

There is no one that we can afford to throw away.

You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to be a valuable person. You become valuable because of the knowledge that you have. And that doesn’t mean you won’t fail sometimes. The important thing is to keep trying.

I have no problem whatsoever with allowing gay people to live as they please, as long as they don’t try to impose their lifestyle on everyone else.

We need to find ways to elevate the expectations, particularly of those individuals who may start off on a lower socioeconomic rung, who might be seen as disadvantaged. But, you know, the reason I say be seen as disadvantaged, it’s because life is so short, and there’s so much that can change.

Our – our friends can’t trust us anymore. You know, Ukraine was a nuclear-armed state. They gave away their nuclear arms with the understanding that we would protect them. We won’t even give them offensive weapons.

There’s no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there’s no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

What we have to stop and think about is that we have weakened ourselves militarily to such an extent that it affects all of our military policies.

It’s very important for people to know themselves and understand what their value system is, because if you don’t know what your value system is, then you don’t know what risks are worth taking and which ones are worth avoiding.

There’s absolutely no reason at all that physicians, scientists, shouldn’t be involved in things that affect all of us.

You need an incredible amount of self-confidence to go digging around in someone’s brain.

The most important thing for me is having a relationship with God. To know that the owner, the creator of the universe loves you, sent His Son to die for your sins; that’s very empowering. Knowing Him and knowing that He loves me gives me encouragement and confidence to move forward.

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.

Economics is not brain surgery.

In my own personal life, God plays a great role in the risk, because I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

Corporations are not in business to be social-welfare organizations; they are there to make money.

When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.

We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.

Sometimes all I want is to be a few inches taller so the world does not look like a dense collection of torsos.

A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century.

Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.

Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.