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It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury — or at least comfort — so there’s a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.

To shine is better than to reflect.

Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

Only fools get to join.

Somehow to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific.

At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life’s pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with — no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

“Free will again,” Cathy said.

“Or free won’t,” Peterson said mildly.

The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.

Religions do not teach doubt.

If you were damned certain you weren’t looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn’t see it.

“One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.”

”For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.”

All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.

Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.

There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

They will do anything for the worker, except become one.

“The peers just fill the air with their speeches.”

“And from what I've seen, vice versa.”