American Quotes

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia - hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

What has always surprised me when I walk into a bookstore is the number of books that you can find that are written with certainty. The authors tell some story as though it's true, but they don't have any evidence that it is true!

We don't really understand most of what's happening in the cosmos. Is there any afterlife? Who knows.

There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science.

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.

The three-pound organ in your skull - with its pink consistency of Jell-o - is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building.

The same stimuli in the world can be inducing very different experiences internally and it's probably based on a single change in a gene. What I am doing is pulling the gene forward and imaging and doing behavioural tests to understand what that difference is and how reality can be constructed so di

People wouldn't even go into science unless there was something much bigger to be discovered, something that is transcendent.

Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.

Neuroscience over the next 50 years is going to introduce things that are mind-blowing.

My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism.

I spent my adult life as a scientist, and science is, essentially, the most successful approach we have to try and understand the vast mysteries around.

I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.

Every week I get letters from people worldwide who feel that the possibilian point of view represents their understanding better than either religion or neo-atheism.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

There's Hezbollah, there's Hamas, there is a whole range of terrorist targets out there related to Palestine and to Israel that we ought to be trying to deal with. And there's a great deal of targets in the Philippines, Indonesia. You name it, there are a number of places where there are targets tha

There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.

There are sometimes problems for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which there is no solution.

There are a lot of other terrorist targets we ought to be focusing on. Well, there is Syria, for example, which is pumping through - because of Iran, is pumping weapons on into Hezbollah and so forth - which is then producing a lot of agony in Palestine and in Israel. We ought to be doing a bit to t

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.

The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

The fact of the matter is that if we were going to do anything about Gaddafi, it should have been at the beginning. And by fooling around like this as long as we have, we have wasted an opportunity that would have gotten rid of him.