Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all.

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.