I came to a happy Jewish family in dark days in Europe.

I learned English, my sixth language at this point, quite quickly.

From a chemist's point of view, the surface or interior of a star…is boring—there are no molecules there.

Knowing without seeing is at the heart of chemistry.

A few atoms added here, subtracted there, is all it takes to make the difference between male and female sex characteristics, between a harmless molecule and a deadly addictive one.

Not every collision, not every punctilious trajectory by which billiard-ball complexes arrive at their calculable meeting places lead to reaction. ... Men (and women) are not as different from molecules as they think.

One day I discovered that one could get the barrier to internal rotation in ethane approximately right using this method. This was the beginning of my work on organic molecules.