We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.

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.

Could I have a Sloe Gin Fizz, without the gin?""What's the point of that, Miss?" the waiter said."Tomorrow morning, " Mabel said.

The last time a straight man worked in the fashion industry, we got a fanny pack.

The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.

Someday our piecing together of knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas we shall either go mad or flee into the safety of a new dark age.

Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.

It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism.

We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are.

I sit at the piano for a couple of hours and tinker away until I get something. I am a nocturnal spirit, like an owl.

Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus...or off the bus.