Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.

History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

It is like a voyage of discovery into unknown lands, seeking not for new territory but for new knowledge. It should appeal to those with a good sense of adventure.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole.