Great Throughts Treasury

"Art is subject to arbitrary fashion."

"Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this."

"Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess."

"Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there."

"Fish don?t know much about water, and people didn?t know much about air."

"I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that."

"If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen."

"I like writing about biology, not doing it."

"I'm not driven by being understood."

"I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess."

"I'm really optimistic in the mornings."

"I'm not politically correct."

"In 1944 Erwin Schroedinger, stimulated intellectually by Max Delbruck, published a little book called What is life? It was an inspiration to the first of the molecular biologists, and has been, along with Delbruck himself, credited for directing the research during the next decade that solved the mystery of how 'like begat like.' Max was awarded this Prize in 1969, and rejoicing in it, he also lamented that the work for which he was honored before all the peoples of the world was not something which he felt he could share with more than a handful. Samuel Beckett's contributions to literature, being honored at the same time, seemed to Max somehow universally accessible to anyone. But not his. In his lecture here Max imagined his imprisonment in an ivory tower of science."

"In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse."

"It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all."

"I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy."

"Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us."

"PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV."

"People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so."

"My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas."

"Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself."

"Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year."

"People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does."

"Science grows like a weed every year."

"Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric."

"Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it."

"The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it."

"Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world."

"The planet is a pretty amazing thing, it?s big and horrible, and big and wonderful, and it does all kinds of things we don?t know anything about."

"The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me."

"They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am."

"You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket."

"We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire."

"You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something."

"We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon."