The scientific process has two motives: one is to understand the natural world, the other is to control it.

Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.

I should never have made a good scientist, but I should have made a perfectly adequate one.

What we need to do is to humanize the scientist and simonize the humanist.

Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.