The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well. It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.

I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.

Mathematics is really an art, not a science. You could say science also is an art. So I would say the difference is something you can't really describe - you can only recognize. You hear somebody playing the violin, and it was Fritz Kreisler or it was somebody else, and you can tell the difference. It is so in almost every art. We just don't understand why it is that there are just a few people who are just completely off the scale and the rest of them are just mediocre. And we don't know why. But I say it's certainly true of mathematics.