The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

Nuclear weapons are intrinsically neither moral nor immoral, though they are more prone to immoral use than most weapons.

There’s almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you’re at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.

Right now in California we gain 40,000 new acres of desert every year, with all the building and the people coming in… housing going up like crazy.

Well, the big products in electronics in the ’50s were radio and television. The first big computers were just beginning to come in and represented the most logical market for us to work in.

Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before.

We turned the switch, saw the flashes, watched for ten minutes, then switched everything off and went home. That night I knew the world was headed for sorrow.

The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would...

But how does it feel to plug into a system that’s say, a million times as smart as a person.

Having been given that public trust, we have a responsibility to share with the public.

I don’t write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it’s finished, it’s done.

Because of new technologies, new wealth, new conditions of domestic life and of international relations, unprecedented criteria and issues are coming up for national decision.

Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers’ rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody – government stay away.

If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present.

I think I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business and electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers.

One can’t, just by writing out line formulas on a two-dimensional sheet of paper, get a feeling for the three-dimensional character of a compound.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.

The whole structure of science gradually grows, but only as it is built upon a firm foundation of past research.

Film, as far as I’m concerned, is my area of artistic endeavor, so I never think of a movie that gets released as being all done-it’s just when they took it away from you.

It’s soothing to realize that my mind’s processes are inherently uncontrollable.

Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides.

I’ve often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

I’m against ignorance.

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth.

Space was of interest, but a major driving factor was the interest in the military, which had much broader, more diverse needs, more urgency with it.

Postdocs are needed to build a modern research team; you want to bring in people with different backgrounds and different skills.

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

I had done a lot of rock ‘n’ roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock ‘n’ roll...

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

No observational problem will not be solved by more data.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

Only those who are ideologically opposed to military programs think of the defense budget as the first and best place to get resources for social welfare needs.

You have to be a grownup. You have to decide what government should do and not do. And what’s its appropriate size and what’s its appropriate scale.

Nothing interferes with my concentration. You could put on an orgy in my office and I wouldn’t look up. Well, maybe once.

Well, the thought that everybody might have a personal computer at their desk or their home was certainly not on the mainstream of anybody’s activity at that time.

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.

The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

I can’t ever remember not wanting to be a scientist.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

Clearly, the first task is to gain acceptance of a more reasonable view of the future, one that opens possibilities rather than forecloses them.

What I’m thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson’s saying that he’d rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.

Ethnological phenomena are the result of the physical and psychical character of men, and of its development under the influence of the surroundings.

I think it’s doing very well. I’m pleased to see the concentration on semiconductors. I think this will help.

This is largely the methodology I’ve used throughout my career – that is, starting with a question as to what might be the properties of a set of compounds that could be invented which were...

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.