A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.

There are many ways of knocking electrons out of atoms. The simplest is to rub two surfaces together.

Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance.

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000).... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

One [idea] was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. This big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination showed that it leads to serious difficulties.

I am genuinely sorry for scientists of the younger generation who never knew Fisher personally. So long as you avoided a handful of subjects like inverse probability that would turn Fisher in the briefest possible moment from extreme urbanity into a boiling cauldron of wrath, you got by with little worse than a thick head from the port which he, like the Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood, loved to drink in the evening. And on the credit side you gained a cherished memory of English spoken in a Shakespearean style and delivered in the manner of a Spanish grandee.