Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.

Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.

And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.

We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.

I think it's much better to have your eyes open, but on the other hand, of course it can do harm if you tell people look, there's all these terrible things you can do and then some idiot may go ahead and do it.

The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. ... The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.