Works of art are all that survive of incredibly gifted people.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.

Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory. It comprises what we know of the material world with reasonable certainty. . . . Thanks to science and technology, access to factual information of all kinds is rising exponentially.

There a lot of locals who have come out to support it. This year, I've seen families. In talking to some our members, the art galleries and some of those folks are doing pretty well.

Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science ... Interpretation is the logical channel of consilient explanation between science and the arts. The arts ... also nourish our craving for the mystical.