To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.
I am a futurist, projecting trends in science into the next decades and century, but ironically my two daughters - one is a neuroscientist and the other is a pastry chef - tell me that my taste in music is positively prehistoric.
There is no singular 'reason' why Africans use fractals, any more than a singular reason why Americans like rock music. Such enormous cultural practices just cover too much social terrain.
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world.
My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.
Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't.
It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.
The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars.
The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.
Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.
Teaching physics at the University, and more general lecturing to wider audiences has been a major concern.
As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.
The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.
Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit.
We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.
No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
