Self-centeredness will bring on the destruction of our world. National pride separates people. All people need the same thing. When you really get down to it, you'll find that all people need good food, clean water, clean air, and a decent environment, meaning education as to how to relate to one another and to avoid conflict, how to accept the differences where different people draw different conclusions.

It is not that people are evil or greedy. The conditions that socially support the system force us to behave in socially offensive ways.

You cannot advocate decency and ethics, you must design the conditions that eliminate the problems. In scarcity, people will tend to steal. If you make things available, people tend not to steal.

You don't need to get rid of religion; you have to outgrow the need for it. In other words, instead of hoping for the good life, you make the good life.

Instruction in academia did not emphasize what I thought of as essential points. I was interested in the broad range of interrelated connections within the physical sciences, but formal studies isolated each branch of science.” I feel that I have advantages greater than Da Vinci’s such as access to more information, materials, and methods.

You have to tell your children about the world they live in, about the discrepancies, about the things that don't work… So you have to bring it up with a scientific orientation so they learn to ask questions, and learn how to say the most difficult thing in the world: 'I don't know'.

We could either develop paradise on Earth or oblivion; wipe ourselves out, only the future will tell. It's what you do to make the future.