My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.

My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.

The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.

A person obsessed with ultimate truth is a person asking to be relieved of money.

In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.

The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether.

But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates.

It is an interesting fact that during my tour I was never allowed access to computers, radios, or anything else that I might damage through curiosity, or perhaps something more sinister.

Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.

It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do.

I was an extremely reclusive and introverted boy.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.

You will achieve what you want to achieve, only if you can cope with the theory of altruism.

Generate an idea which you can follow, not what people would interpret.

A single leaf working alone provides no shade.

You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American.

But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

They [terrorists] are trying to evoke sympathy for themselves. They're not sympathetic people. They're violent, cold-blooded killers who are trying to stop the advance of freedom.

I don't think things through very often - I don't project into the future about how a situation will turn out.

Just think it, and chances are it will happen.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.