I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.

Maybe General Groves was right. Maybe we should just banish thinking forever.

We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism.

All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.

To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.