I was ready to accept the philosophy that the Party is right and that in the coming struggle you could not permit yourself any doubts after the party had made a decision.

Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contacts were left wing and affected to some degree or other by the same kind of philosophy.

The Communist Party said that I must finish my studies because after the revolution in Germany people would be required with technical knowledge to take part in the building of the Communist Germany.

Since coming to Harwell I have met English people of all kinds, and I have come to see in many of them a deep rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life.

Doing interviews can sometimes mess up my head. It makes me feel dirty. It's frustrating how the press recycles a quote to death.

But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I've looked outside and seen people starving to death.

Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.