A budding fashionista even at four, I would capture the little lizards and latch them, still living, onto my earlobes as earrings. Most girls wouldn't touch them, I thought they completed the outfit.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life.

Na hranicích logiky sice končí věda, ne však příroda, která vzkvétá i tam, kam ještě žádná teorie nepronikla.

For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution.

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. ”—Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung in a 1919 address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

It was a large room, heavily outfitted with the usual badly ventilated furnaces, rows of bubbling crucibles, and one stuffed alligator. Things floated in jars. The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

Our instincts weren't built to handle the kind of power our species wields over the planet, nature has been playing rough with us for so long, maybe it is no surprise we are being so rough with her now.

But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment."I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod,"nothing but a gnab gib."A what?"Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy.

…Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed.

There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.

But let us not forget that human love and compassion are equally deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and in this sphere too our sensibilities are of a higher order of magnitude than those of chimpanzees.

Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom.

Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the earth.[Stating how planets supporting life cannot be rare.]