If you don't kick things around with people, you are out of it. Nobody, I always say, can be anybody without somebody being around.

Is the very mechanism for the universe to come into being meaningless or unworkable or both unless the universe is guaranteed to produce life, consciousness and observership somewhere and for some little time in its history-to-be?

Congress is a Mafia running a protection racket.. .

If you don't kick things around with people, you are out of it. Nobody, I always say, can be anybody without somebody being around.

The universe does not exist 'out there,' independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.

The laws of physics must provide a mechanism for the universe to come into being.

I would like to offer a candidate to be added to the venerable list of English collective nouns: a scum of politicians.