People are best judged by their actions

For Christmas, 1939, a girl friend gave me a book token which I used to buy Linus Pauling's recently published Nature of the Chemical Bond. His book transformed the chemical flatland of my earlier textbooks into a world of three-dimensional structures.

What is known for certain is dull.

Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?

Women's liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.

I saw Linus Pauling as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

Discoveries cannot be planned, they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners