If the human being is condemned and restricted to perform the same functions over and over again, he will not even be a good ant, not to mention a good human being.

The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked.

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves

In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.

Science is better paid than at any time in the past. The results of this pay have been to attract into science many of those for whom the pay is the first consideration, and who scorn to sacrifice immediate profit for the freedom of development of their own concept. Moreover, this inner development, important and indispensable as it may be to the world of science in the future, generally does not have the tendency to put a single cent into the pockets of their employers.