'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself.

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.