Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.