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.

Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At...

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn’t deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.

I want to make as many people as possible feel like they are part of this adventure. We are going to give everybody a sense of what exploring the surface of another world is really...

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I’m satisfied with it.

Deterrence itself is not a preeminent value; the primary values are safety and morality.

Don’t leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you’re doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don’t think about technology first.

Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into...

I think the varied backgrounds in the beginning were a plus. It took a while for people to understand what they were trying to do and get started, but it did provide for a lot...

To retain my fascination with chemistry, I have had to change my research fields about every 10 years.

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

But while doing that I’d been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

I like engineering, but I love the creative input.

Lately I’ve been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the...

I think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes – I don’t think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn’t vote for a...

The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science.

The groups that have awarded them are all a little different. It’s a little hard to single out any one for that, but I think the dedication of this building would have to go toward...

When the first computers started to come in, we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen...

If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but...

No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.

You create a pile of dirt and then drive over it. We may have to learn to drive all over again.

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn’t have a real method, there’s a great deal of anxiety over what it is.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn’t a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

The objective of nuclear-weapons policy should not be solely to decrease the number of weapons in the world, but to make the world safer – which is not necessarily the same thing.

During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most...

To introduce something altogether new would mean to begin all over, to become ignorant again, and to run the old, old risk of failing to learn.