You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.

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

You know what's wrong with scientific power? It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.

They didn't understand what they were doing. I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.

Sneaking up on it sometimes helps: I've found I can be very productive for an hour before dinner, because there obviously isn't enough time to really do anything, so I can tell myself I'm just screwing around.

The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

The experience of climbing Kilimanjaro affected me so powerfully that, for a long time afterward, if I caught myself saying, "I'm not a person who likes to do that activity, eat that food, listen to that music," I would automatically go out and do what I imagined I didn't like. Generally I found I was wrong about myself - I liked what I thought I wouldn't like. And even if I didn't like the particular experience, I learned I liked having new experiences.