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.

Aggressiveness is not the main trouble with the human species, but rather an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

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

In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.

Scientists are peeping toms at the keyhole of eternity.

One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

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.