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.

As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.

N. S. Khrushchev established his supremacy in the U.S.S.R. after post-Stalinist alarums and excursions (1958-64). This admirable rough diamond, a believer in reform and peaceful coexistence, who incidentally emptied Stalin's concentration camps, dominated the international scene in the next few years. He was also perhaps the only peasant boy ever to rule a major state

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system

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.

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

The paradox of communism in power was that it was conservative.