Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.

If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.

If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.

We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.

I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone.

It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.