A child from the age of 2 or 3 absorbs what is in the environment and what generates hatred for anyone perceived to be different.

I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom.

If I die tomorrow or in a year, it is the same — it is the message you leave behind you that counts.

It's not enough what I did in the past - there is also the future.

After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom.

A child from the age of 2 or 3 absorbs what is in the environment and what generates hatred for anyone perceived to be different.

It is imperfection - not perfection - that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.