All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong.

Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.

In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.

I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures.

Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!

God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.

The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.