Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance.

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.

It's a shame I'm going to be forced to commit severe testicular trauma upon that boy

My own view is that Kant's conception of the duality of the good (morality and happiness, the good of our person and the good of our state or condition) is a distinctively modern view.

I am interested in all things that celebrate and enhance the female form.

breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.

I have to satisfy my audience.

I've been too many places. I'm like the bad penny.

A tour is the most intense, stimulating way to hear music; it's the best form to receive it. There's genuine excitement from people. I feel like we've stepped up a level.

Prayer is the pulse of the renewed soul; and the constancy of its beat is the test and measure of the spiritual life.

In recent years, more and more of my time has become absorbed by administrative work for the research council of ETH-Z of which I am presently the president.