Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook and time is running out.

The cell door slammed behind Rubishov.

Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness. Both are funny, but only in retrospect.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

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.

Nobody before the Pythagorean had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred.