Sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has lived before us Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.

"To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them."

"That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.""

Every animal leaves traces of what he was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

"It doesn't matter whether you're talking about bombs or the intelligence quotients of one race as against another if a man is a scientist, like me, he'll always say "Publish and be damned.""