"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing…"

"I was very surprised that a lot of artists, when they found out I was a scientist, they would start telling me about their theories of the universe, and they were always crackpot theories."

"I don't believe in the idea of a 'genius.' I believe in the idea of a 'hard worker.'"

"I was at a party once, and some woman said to me, 'You're a scientist, you know all about radiation. How much radiation is in a banana?' I said, 'A banana has about 1/1000th of a milligram of radium i…"

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all th…"