In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

You can certainly destroy enough of humanity so that only the greatest act of faith can persuade you that what's left will be human.

Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.

If we must live with a perpetual sense that the world and the men in it are greater than we and too much for us, let it be the measure of our virtue that we know this and seek no comfort.

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

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.

Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'.