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

Nothing is easier to avoid than publicity. If one genuinely doesn't want it, one doesn't get it.

I felt I was moving among two groups [literary intellectuals and scientists] comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington Hom or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.

This ability to incorporate the past gives the sharpest diagnostic tool, if one asks whether a body of knowledge is a science or not. Do present practitioners have to go back to an original work of the past? Or has it been incorporated? ... Science is cumulative, and embodies its past.

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

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

Well, we have seen a wonder. We ought to count our blessings.