Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.

My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.

The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.

I was an extremely reclusive and introverted boy.

At Berkeley I had my first encounter with real professional scientists.

My job at Stanford is rather different from the ones I had held previously in that my own ambitions must take a back seat to the well-being of the students with whom I work.

I also taught myself how to blow glass using a propane torch from the hardware store and managed to make some elementary chemistry plumbing such as tees and small glass bulbs.

In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.

As a consequence while we had a roof over our heads, food on the table, and clothes to wear to school we were constantly conscious of being of modest means.

When I moved to Stanford I began to pursue the line of research I have been following ever since, namely trying to understand the larger implications of fractional quantum hall discovery.

My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.

Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.

One of the terrific aspects of MIT in those days was the enormous variety of experimental work that either took place there or was talked about in seminars by outside speakers aggressively recruited by the faculty.

But the need for conflict to expose prejudice and unclear reasoning, which is deeply embedded in my philosophy of science, has its origin in these debates.

It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists.

It was at Bell Labs that I first made direct contact with real semiconductor experts and thus began to fully understand what amazing materials they were and what they could do.

My mother, who was professional schoolteacher, was particularly concerned about our formal education and even went so far as to start a private school together with some other parents so that our intellectual needs would be met.

It is an interesting fact that during my tour I was never allowed access to computers, radios, or anything else that I might damage through curiosity, or perhaps something more sinister.

To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed.

Another important aspect of our home was respect for ideas.

Over the course of time this gave us a deep respect for ideas, both our own and those of others, and an understanding that conflict through debate is a powerful means of revealing truth.

Tech Jacket shares the same tone as Invincible, but the subject matter is very different. Where Invincible is about perfection, Tech Jacket is about flaws.

Every time you go out on the ice, there are slight flaws. You can always think of something you should have done better. These are the things you must work on.

I do not believe we can blame genetics for adultery, homosexuality, dishonesty and other character flaws.

If you can learn to love yourself and all the flaws, you can love other people so much better. And that makes you so happy.

The reason they keep it so tight is that no one liked them, so that without each other, actually, they couldn't exist. They support each other. They support their flaws and everything else.

That's what it is every time you walk into the room to write with someone new. It's like, oh god I have to take my clothes off 'my creative clothes' and let them see all of my flaws.

You know, having been an election monitor in countries across the world, I can tell you that we would never certify another country's election if it had as many flaws in place as we had in Florida.

Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.

That so unlikely an outcome should accrue to a man possessed of such limited talent and so many flaws, and one lacking in a sense of ethics and decency was one of the bitter ironies of history.

You can be a great president and be ridden with flaws. Of course we know that.

There are so many factors when you think of your own films. You think of the people you worked on it with, and somehow forget the movie. You can't forgive the movie for a long time. It takes a few years to look at it with any objectivity and forgive its flaws.

I expect VA's inspector general and the FBI to work closely together so that we can identify and eliminate the flaws that allowed this leak and prosecute any criminal acts.

There is a price for popularity. Critics look for your weaknesses, your flaws, anything that makes the work seem like a fluke and not seem worthy of all the attention it's getting.

The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.

I have a critical nature, in the sense that when I look at something I often look for the flaws.

We need to be calling out the flaws and misguided decisions of the Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration.

I think all women go through periods where we hate this about ourselves, we don't like that. It's great to get to a place where you dismiss anything you're worried about. I find flaws attractive. I find scars attractive.

You know, we have to take these characters - who, granted, have their separate personalities but, on a lot of levels, are pretty two-dimensional - and make them into people with flaws, with insecurities.

It would be really great if people would realize that stars are only people with the same weaknesses and flaws, not immaculate idols.

Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.

If there are flaws they are in ourselves, and our task therefore must be one not of redesign but of renewal and reaffirmation, especially of the standards in which all of us believe.

This president has been reluctant to hold anybody accountable. No one was held accountable after September the 11th. Nobody's been held accountable after the clear flaws in intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq.

The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.

The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

You can find flaws in Agassi and Sampras, but Federer has none.

It's a very complex scenario, and certainly Dave was, and is, not the only person in Pearl Jam with personality flaws. Everybody in this band exhibits some form of neurotic behavior. And we couldn't find a balance, a mutual respect for each other.