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.

George Lucas wanted this moving camera for all of the photography in Star Wars. He was willing to take a risk with the concepts that I advanced with regard to ways for doing that.

It’s tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that’s not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it’s going to end.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

I’ve written a lot of books which are written from the moon – the view from nowhere.

I’m against sloppy, emotional thinking.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works – I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the...

Remember that in every single case in history the process of adaptation has been one of exceeding slowness. Do not look for the impossible, but do not let your path deviate from the quiet and...

The first calculators tended to sell for $400 or $500. Today, you can get a pretty good one for 4 or $5.

The notion of graduate students as colleagues rather than students is a more modern notion, I think – across the country, in many different fields.

Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.

I’ve encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to be more a matter of inertia than it...

To hate is to study, to study is to understand, to understand is to appreciate, to appreciate is to love. So maybe I’ll end up loving your theory.

Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons.

Anthropology in general has always been fairly hospitable to female scholars, and even to feminist scholars.

Two people have been really liberating in my mind; one is Wittgenstein and the other is Burke. I read Burke before he was a secular saint, before everyone was reading him.

Projecting a persuasive image of a desirable and practical future is extremely important to high morale, to dynamism, to consensus, and in general to help the wheels of society turn smoothly.

Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don’t expect the world that we’re familiar with to be perfect.

If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster.

Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.

Pronouncement of experts to the effect that something cannot be done has always irritated me.