This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

A time comes in the life of a man when all you do is reflect on retrospective actions and desire better outcomes in the future

In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.

That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.

There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed.

That is the beautiful part about weights: even if you are 100 year old, you can lift something. Maybe it's only a half a pound or a pound or two pounds. It will still do something.

I'm not really very ambitious.

A community is a small group working together. Community scales by adding groups, and building connections between them, not enlarging them.

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.

Learn Everything that is Good from Others, but bring it in, and in your own way absorb it; do not become others.

No foreign policy will stick unless the American people are behind it. And unless Congress understands it. And unless Congress understands it, the American people aren't going to understand it.