"It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet."

"As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life."

"Nature [is] that lovely lady to whom we owe polio, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, cancer."

"I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists."

"He is so old that his blood type was discontinued."

"Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity."

"Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question "Why?""

"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

"What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on."

"Like the furtive collectors of stolen art, we [cell biologists] are forced to be lonely admirers of spectacular architecture, exquisite symmetry, dramas of violence and death, mobility, self-sacrifice and, yes, rococo sex."