Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.

I should never have made a good scientist, but I should have made a perfectly adequate one.

I think, on the whole that scientists make slightly better husbands and fathers than most of us, and I admire them for it.

Nothing is easier to avoid than publicity. If one genuinely doesn’t want it, one doesn’t get it.

Groups of men, even small groups, act strangely differently from individuals. They have less humour and simpler humour, are more easy to frighten, more difficult to charm, distrust the mysterious more, and enjoy firm, flat, competent expositions which a man by himself would find inexcusably dull. Perhaps.

There is, of course, no complete solution. But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves.

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.

The scientific process has two motives: one is to understand the natural world, the other is to control it.

The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets.

It takes a very strong head to keep secrets for years and not go slightly mad. It isn’t wise to be advised by anyone slightly mad.