The modern technological world appears overwhelming to many people. It drives some to pessimism and despair. It makes others doubt the future of mankind unless we retreat to simpler lives and even to the ways of our ancestors. What these people fail to realize is that we cannot go back to those ways and those days. Furthermore, for all our difficulties, life today is far better for more people and the possibilities for the future can be brighter than ever if we develop not only new knowledge, but a greater faith and confidence in the human mind and spirit.

People must understand that science is inherently neither a potential for good nor for evil. It is a potential to be harnessed by man to do his bidding.

All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard.

There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.

There are young people today who feel that we shouldn't have developed the atomic bomb, that it was a mistake. Through no fault of their own, they don't have this sense of history. They didn't live through this most terrifying period when we thought we were losing the race with Adolf Hitler.

I believe that one of the characteristics of the human race, possibly the one that is primarily responsible for its course of evolution, is that it has grown by creatively responding to failure.

The education of young people in science is at least as important, maybe more so, than the research itself.