Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.

You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet.

A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there.

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.