I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

On the average, older parents are more flexible, tolerant, understanding, and happy in child care.

People have criticized me for seeming to step out of my professional role to become undignifiedly political. I'd say it was belated realization that day care, good schools, health insurance, and nuclear disarmament are even more important aspects of pediatrics than measles vaccine or vitamin D.

My initial thoughts of becoming a lawyer changed in high school as I became more attracted to math and science and began talking about being an engineer.

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data.

Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.