My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

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.

We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.

Your steady rain of words soaked me to the skin

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.

There is no such thing as death. We have all lived before and we are all going to experience new lives.

Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.

Life is the gift of God, and is divine.

Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle.

Marriage is about compromise; it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to.