The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say Publish and be damned.