From my childhood it has been my conviction that men would reach the planets in my lifetime . . . this conviction . . . rests on two beliefs, one scientific and one political: (1) there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our present-day science. And we shall only find out what they are if we go out and look for them. (2) it is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of people can escape from their neighbors and from their governments, to go and live as they please in the wilderness.

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

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann's aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.

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

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.

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.