When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. I guided each [experiment] by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm . . . the realm of the imagination guides my thinking.

There is no such thing as failure, there's just giving up too soon.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

I have come to recognize evolution not only as an active process that I am experiencing at the time, but as something I can guide by the choices I make.

There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.