A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.

All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.

If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men.

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

It's not good enough to give it tender, loving care, to supply it with breakfast foods, to buy it expensive educations. Those things don't mean anything unless this generation has a future. And we're not sure that it does.

I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.

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