I was about 16 years old years when my father took me to a square dance festival in North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I found there was music in my country that you never heard on the radio, and you didn't hear on the juke boxes, and in theaters. I fell in love with it, especially the long-necked banjos.

I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.

I would ask, "How can one have a technological society without research? How can one have research without researching dangerous areas? How can one research dangerous areas without uncovering dangerous information? How can you uncover dangerous information without it falling into the hands of insane people who will sooner or later destroy the human race, if not the whole of life on earth?" Who knows? God only knows!

In a world of private property, if something isn't owned by somebody, it's going to be misused by somebody else.

Participation - that's what's gonna save the human race.

If there is a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.

It's a terrible thing being a patriarch. I don't even have a gray beard. But people keep calling me up for advice.