Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office.

The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration.

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

We need to reduce military budgets; raise living standards; engender respect for learning; support science, scholarship, invention, and industry; promote free inquiry; reduce domestic coercion; involve the workers more in managerial decisions; and promote genuine respect and understanding derived from an acknowledgement of our common humanity and our common jeopardy.

Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.