The objective of nuclear-weapons policy should not be solely to decrease the number of weapons in the world, but to make the world safer - which is not necessarily the same thing.
Many people believe that the current system must inevitably end in total annihilation. They reject, sometimes very emotionally, any attempts to analyze this notion.
I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. (quoting the Bhagavad-Gita after witnessing the first Nuclear explosion.)
I think it's very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.
I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics.
On my return to Pittsburgh, I resolved to go back to the fundamental problems of electronic structure that I had contemplated abstractly many years earlier.
Our children were mostly brought up and educated in the Churchill suburb east of Pittsburgh. Each summer, we took them back to England for an extended period.
The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.
I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.
But individuals and firms spend an enormous amount of resources acquiring information, which affects their beliefs; and actions of others too affect their beliefs.
We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
We should teach the students, as well as executives, how to conduct experiments, how to examine data, and how to use these tools to make better decisions.
A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.
Nobody would say, 'I'm voting for this guy because he's got the stronger chin,' but that, in fact, is partly what happens.
So your emotional state really has a lot to do with what you're thinking about and what you're paying attention to.
We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.
When people talk of the economy being strong, they don't seem to feel that they, too, are better off.
People should be conscious of the large contribution made by anything that gets people together easily in the reduction of loneliness and emotional well-being.
Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness. A policy to reduce the loneliness of the elderly would certainly reduce suffering.
