It is exceptional that one should be able to acquire the understanding of a process without having previously acquired a deep familiarity with running it, with using it, before one has assimilated it in an instinctive and empirical way... Thus any discussion of the nature of intellectual effort in any field is difficult, unless it presupposes an easy, routine familiarity with that field. In mathematics this limitation becomes very severe.

There is no point in being precise if you do not even know what you are talking about.

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.

Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.