It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time.

Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance.

There is nothing worth having that can he obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.

I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective.

Death seems to have been a rather late invention in evolution. One can go a long way in evolution before encountering an authentic corpse.