If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 100,000, I know he's full of crap.

It is necessary for the very existence of science that minds exist which do not allow that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions.

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts.

We find that the statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty: "It is very much more likely that so and so is true than that it is not true".

I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher - a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal.

Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.