Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes.

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

Night and day the streets resounded with music, song, and the clinking of chalices and tankards, for it is well known that nothing is such thirsty work as the acquisition of knowledge.

When you do not know how to focus your thoughts effectively, they can become scattered, miscellaneous, and fixated on "stuff negative notions, toxic relationships, and situations from the past."

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

Nothing about us without us.

I've been in therapy. I know enough about myself now to know that I really don't need to know anymore.

Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.

Only love can bring us peace. And the experience of love is a choice we make, a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value in any situation.

I'm not a politician and I'm not trying to change anybody's mind. I'm just exploring what I see.

For most Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.