It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual

There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.

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.

The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.

When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.