I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences.

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that there is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences.

In each case you settle on an act. Doing nothing at all counts as an act.

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.

Thers is this wonderful iconoclast at Rutgers, Doron Zeilberger, who says that our mathematics is the result of a random walk, by which he means what WE call mathematics. Likewise, I think, for the sciences.