If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?

One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work - supposing you're trying to find out how a cat works--you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you've got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn't a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him.

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?