There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.
The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It’s the child that’s remembered.
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
If we want to go to space with humans, that’s for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.
If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.
A model is such a fascinating toy that you fall in love with your creation.
I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy.
The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.
Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.
The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all. There’s no reason why one should be scared.
It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true.
The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.
The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes – as well as humans. It is not important that we didn’t actually finish the human sequence yet.
Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
Mostly I’m just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.
We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.