Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.

Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

So maybe home is something that changes as we do, something that expands and contracts with time and loss.

When you use some of the more modern recording devices and Pro Tools, when you get into the technology, you are aching to get into some territory.

I like having written better than I like having acted.

Recovery from illness often seems like beginning life all over again.

My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.

Well, I think the best thing we can do for the short term is move good energy legislation through to the Congress; I'm encouraged that there's some prospect for that now.

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

Understand the acute difference between the cost of something and the value of something.