Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

A sword in the hands of a drunken slave is less dangerous than science in the hands of the immoral.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

The faster you go, the shorter you are.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Nearly every great advance in science arises from a crises in the old theory, through an endeavor to find a way out of the difficulties created. We must examine old ideas, old theories, although they belong to the past, for this is the only way to understand the importance of the new ones and the extent of their validity.

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

There is almost no area of human life today that is not touched by the effects of science and technology. Yet are we clear about the place of science in the totality of human life - what exactly it should do and by what it should be governed? This last point is critical because unless the direction of science is guided by a consciously ethical motivation, especially compassion, its effects may fail to bring benefit.

I always tell people that we human beings, in a way because of this intelligence, are the biggest troublemakers. Yet because of this intelligence, we also have the capacity to not only take care of ourselves but also to take care of the whole world. According to Buddhist psychology, most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.

I am a very bottom-up thinker.

I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.

It was a bizarre business at the time, you could be working on cryptographic projects for the government, still they wouldn't tell you anything about what they wanted you to do.W

A good theory in sociology would be very practical, I assume. It would help you to understand how societies behave, how people make decisions. That problem is too complicated. Nobody knows how to do that.

I hope I have lived a life of science whose style will encourage younger people.

I certainly saw science as a kind of calling, and one with as much legitimacy as a religious calling.

The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful.

Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.

A scientist should be the happiest of men.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.

As far as extra dimensions are concerned, very tiny extra dimensions wouldn't be perceived in everyday life, just as atoms aren't: we see many atoms together but we don't see atoms individually.

And it turned out in string theory in the late '80s and early '90s we actually were able to calculate examples where you could really see changes in the topology of spacetime.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Science is shaped by ignorance. Great questions themselves evolve, of course, because their answers spawn new and better questions in turn.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

As far as extra dimensions are concerned, very tiny extra dimensions wouldn't be perceived in everyday life, just as atoms aren't: we see many atoms together but we don't see atoms individually.

But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.

Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet.

There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of space time to change.

We see light waves with our eyes, but most of the other particles take 20th-century equipment to discover them.

If I take the theory as we have it now, literally, I would conclude that extra dimensions really exist. They're part of nature. We don't really know how big they are yet, but we hope to explore that in various ways.

Spreading out the particle into a string is a step in the direction of making everything we're familiar with fuzzy. You enter a completely new world where things aren't at all what you're used to.

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

In the case of string theory, with our present understanding, there would be nothing more basic than the string.

I guess it's possible that string theory could be wrong. But if it is in fact wrong, it's amazing that it's been so rich and has survived so many brushes with catastrophe and has linked up with the established physical theories in so many ways, providing so many new insights about them.

As of now, string theorists have no explanation of why there are three large dimensions as well as time, and the other dimensions are microscopic. Proposals about that have been all over the map.

One of the basic things about a string is that it can vibrate in many different shapes or forms, which gives music its beauty.