Species diversity can be thought of as an insurance policy against today's environmental change and tomorrow's new evolutionary challenges.

Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.

Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

I’m just too sexy for my cat. If I wasn’t as sexy for my cat, I probably wouldn’t have came back. I’m so sexy, I came back.

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

Newton's laws of physics can rarely be applied to the real world. There is more to life than cause and effect. Things just aren't that simple

Every time a scientist publishes a good piece of work, she helps to maintain and raise the standards for what is true. We have to keep chipping away.

The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)