All people are the same, pretty well irrespective of color, creed, or — Fred Hoyle

"There is an important difference between an advance in science and achievements in the humanities. A great musician consumes intellectual capital, he does not supply it, or at least it is usual for him to consume more than he creates. It has been impossible to use the motto theme of the Fifth Symphony after Beethoven used it. In science, on the other hand, the situation is the other way round. A breakthrough invariably opens up more new problems to be solved. A Newton or an Einstein may leave the world with a century or more of clearing up to be done."

"Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."

"The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."

"Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. ...As soon as I learned from my mother that there was there was a place called school that I must attend willy-nilly—a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a teacher, not about matters decided by yourself—I was appalled."

"To achieve anything really worthwhile in research it is necessary to go against the opinions of ones fellows. To do so successfully, not merely becoming a crackpot, requires fine judgement, especially on long-term issues that cannot be settled quickly. ...To hold popular opinion is cheap, costing nothing in reputation, whereas to accept that there is evidence pointing oppositely... is to risk scientific tar and feathers. Yet not to take the risk is to make certain that, if something new is really there, you wont be the one to find it."

"It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs."

"The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."