“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile.”

Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

I think we should teach them [the people] wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more.

I have no responsibility to live up to what others expect of me. That’s their mistake, not my failing.

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.

You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death.

A philosopher once said, It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results. Well, they don’t!

I couldn’t claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys-but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

Americans think the only funny Brits are John Cleese, Benny Hill and whoever makes our toothpaste. They’re not laughing with us, they are laughing at us.

There’s a lot of producers that are much more technical or gear-skilled than I am. But I have a pure idea of what I like and where I want to go and I follow that.

You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.

Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

Henceforth the leaves of the tree of knowledge were for women, and for the healing of the nations.

It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.

Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved.