Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.
To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours is too incredible to be taken seriously.
Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.
If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.
You cannot understand the glories of the universe without believing there is some Supreme Power behind it.
My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.
-But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
What is it possible to do well, in physics particularly, if things are not reduced to degrees and measures?
We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.
Any device in science is a window on to nature, and each new window contributes to the breadth of our view.
What Bell is to the telephone—or, more aptly, what Eastman is to photography—Haloid could be to xerography.
Can we learn to become more learning-oriented individually and collectively, rather than 'I know' oriented?
Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.
The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.
Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
To be humane, we must ever be ready to pronounce that wise, ingenious and modest statement 'I do not know'.
Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.
As Hoffman later lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.
My third appeal is to my fellow citizens in all countries: Help us to establish lasting peace in the world.
A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa.
The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.
What seems today inconceivable will appear one day, from a higher stand point, quite simple and harmonious.
We're in 'Jurassic Park' territory. If we go to the zoo in the future, we'll have zoos for extinct animals.
I predict that technology will enable people to transmit their neuronal, actual feelings over the Internet.
It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.
Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.
If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives.
Maybe I don't have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years.
Maybe if you win a Nobel Prize in economics, you make a lot of money by giving talks... but not in my area.
Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity.
Mankind spends much more on training pilots of aircraft than it does to train the nuclear reactor operators.
In 1960, I married Laurose Becker. We have two children: Elizabeth, born in 1961, and Matthew, born in 1963.
The application of group theory to physics became one of the main branches of physics that I specialized in.
In Nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion and change.
There is no case where ignorance should be preferred to knowledge - especially if the knowledge is terrible.
Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.
The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.
Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.
If you want to help Africa, you should help them out of poverty, not try to build solar cells and windmills.
In the evenings I studied chemistry at the University of Chicago, the weekends I helped in the family store.
I think I'd be depressed if everything were nearly all known, but I don't feel any danger of that happening.
No theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can require spatially separate events to be independent.
As a physicist, I've always found cosmology to be a rational elixir; it distances me from ordinary concerns.
If string theory is a mistake, it's not a trivial mistake. It's a deep mistake and therefore kind of worthy.
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.
Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.
A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.
It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don't have an inkling of at the moment.