Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

The greatest inventors are unknown to us. Someone invented the wheel - but who?

Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life - which is fundamentally dependent on light - to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that.

All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.