Almost everything about the universe is astounding. I think the most amazing thing is how gifted we are - we are only monkeys who came down from the trees just recently. We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running.

Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.

Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.

Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.

[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.