“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.”

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.

You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.

Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.

Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know, people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chance to play out your second one.

But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

Twentieth-century culture’s disease is the inability to feel their reality.

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.

The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer’s Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.

Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.

The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge.

Dishonoring what we feel is an epidemic that has us self-medicating as a culture and trying to numb ourselves.

The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary.