There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

Telephone and telegraph were better means of communication than the holy man's telepathy

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

Human beings are not efficiently designed for a capitalist system of production.

He[Napoleon] had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.

The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.

The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity.