It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

Civilization will reach maturity only when it learns to value diversity of character and of ideas.

I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.

Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

The moment when one first meets a great work of art has an impact that can never again be recaptured.

It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.