What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

Human beings are the only creatures on the planet that tell time and think they have to earn a living.