I have a philosophy that has guided me throughout all of my scientific career, and that is, I think of myself as a fairly thoughtful person. I don't go into projects impetuously, and I try to select important problems.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.

I like problems at the borders of disciplines. One of the reasons that neurobiology of learning and memory appeal to me so much was that I liked the idea of bringing biology and psychology together.

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.

When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated.

Whatever faith you have you ought to be willing to confront it with the discoveries of science. There's something ignoble about not being willing to look at what we've found about the way the world is and trying to reconcile it with whatever you've decided to believe in for yourself.

You could get an entire computer science education for free right now.

We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there's the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there's the science space part of NASA, and there's also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.