Words are like harpoons. Once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.

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.

Life cannot have had a random beginning. ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the 40,000 power, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

Well, we now have such a photograph... Has any new idea been let loose? It certainly has. You will have noticed how suddenly everybody has become seriously concerned to protect the natural environment... It seems to me more than a coincidence that this awareness should have happened at exactly the moment man took his first step into space.

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

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