The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.

I believe in intelligence, and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quanitified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like.

The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs—for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?

Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.

The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.