My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

I'm not politically correct.

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college.

My father was a police officer before he retired. One of my brothers is also a police officer, and I think they kind of expected I would do something along those lines, like become a fireman or something.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

And Big Night, I think by the end the brothers find that balance, when they touch each other on the shoulder over breakfast and it's understood that what should never have driven them apart almost drove them apart. I think that's a true moment.

I'm a former hippie, so clothes are important to me - your clothes defined you in that period. I guess clothes still defines people. But, I change a lot. I'm in my Brooks Brothers period now.

Politics is too partisan, and sometimes patriotism is cast aside. Patriotism is honor and love of your country and your brothers and sisters. With politics I get the impression that it's all about what's good for the party and not necessarily what's good for the country.

We're brothers and we all look after each other. If one person falls down, the rest of the team is going to be there to pick him up. We just work hard together to get it done.

I grew up with six brothers. That's how I learned to dance - waiting for the bathroom.

My actions to promote peace, the mediation missions which I carried out during many conflicts, which very often occurred between brothers of the same country, are not driven by any ulterior motives or any calculations based on personal ambitions.

Both my brothers became physicians and I, of course, wandered into a business where the undisciplined are welcome.

Big sisters and brothers... I am telling you, it never changes.

My daddy expected that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He had lived in an America of continual social progress.

My other family is Fleetwood Mac. I don't need the money, but there's an emotional need for me to go on the road again. There's a love there; we're a band of brothers.

Rock 'n' roll offered me a platform to speak what I felt. It also offered me a platform to support my mama and my brothers and sisters - twelve children.

Ye are brothers, ye are men, and we conquer but to save.

If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.