The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

Knowing "why" (an idea) is more important than learning "what" (the fact).

It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?

We're not all equal, it's simply not true. That isn't science.

Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.

Our goal should be to understand our differences.

The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.

Never be the brightest person in the room.

Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.

Read to refresh your mind.

With all deference to Chairman Mao and other authors whose quotations derive from longer works, it seemed that I was becoming the world's first writer of self-contained ready-made quotations.

Life is so short. Why waste a single day of it doing something that doesn't matter, that doesn't try to do something big?

I don't think so much anymore. When you're younger, and at your height, then people want you to do that great one again. But seriously, things are forgotten, and that's the truth.

Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.

I'm not Derek Jeter, there will be no farewell tour.

Family romances are the only ones that never turn out happily.

Abbey Lee was a very famous model and had great success. She was very open about the negative aspects of that industry.