It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye ... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

Dissent is the mark of freedom.

One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.

I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

I think people love to attach themselves to the idea of an overnight success. That may be true about me.

We haven't the time to take out time.

If you have to tell them who you are, you aren't anybody.

Frustration is not the way to go.

Death - a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service to the flesh.

Where it is a general rule that it is wrong to gratify lovers, this can be attributed to the defects of those who make that rule: the government's lust for rule and the subjects' cowardice.