Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.

I am not sure whether ethical absolutes exist. But I am sure that we have to act as if they existed or civilization perishes.

Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.

There is an abundance of ancient place names in the Ukraine and Poland, which derive from 'Khazar' or 'Zhid' (Jew).