But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.

With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.

Today, it is research with human embryonic stem cells and attempts to prepare cloned stem cells for research and medical therapies that are being disavowed as being ethically unacceptable.

Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies.

Fears of creating new kinds of plagues or of altering human evolution or of irreversibly altering the environment were only some of the concerns that were rampant.

But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.

If I’m super lucky, I might be able to fight him off and maybe even the warrior after him, but it’s not a long-term survival strategy. By long-term, I mean the next ten minutes.We’re screwed.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.

You do angry. I just saw it. And you left at least one hole in my carpet to prove it.

People in love, in whom every sense is open, cannot beat off the influence of a place.

Many a man who goes to Las Vegas to get away from it all soon finds that Las Vegas gets it all away from him.

Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.

If it's not bourbon or sweatpants, it's going in the garbage.... No, don't get creative. Now is not a creative time. Now is a bourbon and sweatpants time.

It's like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific.

I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.