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.

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

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 most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.

The richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay...

The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.