A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.

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

Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.

I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.

Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing.

I think if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause of death, he'd be thrown out of the union. There is always some final event, some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes off a life. No one dies of old age.

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