Fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air.

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.

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

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.

Go wherever the narrow way passes. If possible, go wherever there seems to be no way and create a way.

For as long as I care to remember, religion, like the striptease, has always been a display of the power of suggestion. Like the Virgin Birth, it has all too often supported an immaculate deception.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

Just as important, we need a new dedication to opening avenues for employee participation and motivation through profit-sharing and innovative programs of job enrichment.

When I write a novel I put into play all the information inside me. It might be Japanese information or it might be Western; I don't draw a distinction between the two.

Humble things become the humble.

When a person is carrying their sin, it can be quite a load...I don't know what else to do with your sin but confess and ask God to forgive it.

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.