All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.

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

The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.

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

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.

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.