Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

There is no point outside the 'world' from where we may judge on TRUE and FALSE.

I have taken my best pains not to laugh at the actions of mankind, not to groan over them, not to be angry at them, but to understand them

A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

. . .she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Communitarianism -- the ambition of collective self-realization -- is one of the most persistent threats to the human spirit.

The natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them.