A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn’t serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy.

Life has a status in the physical universe. It is part of the order of nature. It has a high place in that order, since it probably represents the most complex state of organisation that matter has achieved in our universe. We on this planet have an especially proud place as men; for in us as men matter has begun to contemplate itself...

There is nothing worth having that can he obtained by nuclear war – nothing material or ideological – no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

We have fallen in love with the body. That’s that thing that looks back at us from the mirror. That’s the repository of that lovely identity that you keep chasing all your life.

The thought that we’re in competition with Russians or with Chinese is all a mistake, and trivial. We are one species, with a world to win.

The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It’s their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they’ve been saying, You can kill us, but you’ll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.

It’s not good enough to give it tender, loving care, to supply it with breakfast foods, to buy it expensive educations. Those things don’t mean anything unless this generation has a future. And we’re not sure that it does.

We’ve committed many war crimes in Vietnam – but I’ll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.

I think if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause of death, he’d be thrown out of the union. There is always some final event, some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes off a life. No one dies of old age.

There’s life all over this universe, but the only life in the solar system is on earth, and in the whole universe we are the only men.