Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.

We are a scientific civilization. That means a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ... Knowledge is our destiny.

Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

But nature - that is, biological evolution - has not fitted man to any specific environment. On the contrary, ... he has a rather crude survival kit; and yet -this is the paradox of the human condition - one that fits him to all environments. Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment but to change it.

The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self-interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way.

I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.