A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?

It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

I don't think of myself predicting things. I'm expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it's a question of how badly people want them to.

I have the freedom to do what I want... bright people to talk to every day.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.

The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.

The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.

The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.

The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.

Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.

Biology is now bigger than physics as measured by the size of budgets by the size of the workforce or by the output of major discoveries and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty first century.

Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.

Climate change is part of the normal order of things and we know it was happening before humans came.

It is not surprising that honest and well informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts there is another deeper disagreement about values.

Sanity is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.

So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.

We thought it would be fun to try to design a show that would work well internationally and so that' s what we're intending to do with Fraggle Rock, and we are indeed now selling it around the world.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

It was by design that we mostly used pictures that you could not necessarily see what was going on, and that didn't really focus in on the band, but instead focused in on a theme.

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.

A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.

Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated.

We want people to realize you are at a design school, not a land grant college. The way we look says a great deal about who we are.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

Good design is good business.

It would be nice to design a real briefcase - you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.

If we don't have accurate information, if we are not able to tell difficult truth one to another, we will never be able to effectively design a policy for Iraq.

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.