I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.

Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.

There's life all over this universe, but the only life in the solar system is on earth, and in the whole universe we are the only men.

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.

Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.