When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

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.

The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.

Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.

We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.