[Overfishing—] it’s not just that we’re taking too many out, it’s how we’re doing it. We are wiping out their nurseries, … [because some huge boats] … bottom trawl … [with] nets that 50 years ago you’d have to lift when you came to coral reefs or rocks or nooks and crannies. Now they’re so sophisticated and so heavy, the equipment, and the boat’s so powerful they can just drag right over the coral reefs and the rocks and the nooks and crannies, and turn them into a gravel pit. … The trouble is those are the nurseries. That’s where the little fish hide and get bigger and get big enough for us to eat.

A fear of intellectual inadequacy, of powerlessness before the tireless electronic wizards, has given rise to dozens of science-fiction fantasies of computer takeovers. ... Other scientists too are apprehensive. D. Raj Reddy, a computer scientist at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University, fears that universally available microcomputers could turn into formidable weapons. Among other things, says Reddy, sophisticated computers in the wrong hands could begin subverting a society by tampering with people’s relationships with their own computers—instructing the other computers to cut off telephone, bank and other services, for example.

For forty-nine months between 1968 and 1972, two dozen Americans had the great good fortune to briefly visit the Moon. Half of us became the first emissaries from Earth to tread its dusty surface. We who did so were privileged to represent the hopes and dreams of all humanity. For mankind it was a giant leap for a species that evolved from the Stone Age to create sophisticated rockets and spacecraft that made a Moon landing possible. For one crowning moment, we were creatures of the cosmic ocean, an epoch that a thousand years hence may be seen as the signature of our century.

If you look over my Scientific American columns you will see that they get progressively more sophisticated as I began reading math books and learning more about the subject. There is no better way to learn anything than to write about it!

In a sense, of course, probability theory in the form of the simple laws of chance is the key to the analysis of warfare;… My own experience of actual operational research work, has however, shown that its is generally possible to avoid using anything more sophisticated. … In fact the wise operational research worker attempts to concentrate his efforts in finding results which are so obvious as not to need elaborate statistical methods to demonstrate their truth. In this sense advanced probability theory is something one has to know about in order to avoid having to use it.

It seems rather incongruous that in a society of super-sophisticated communications, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.

It’s a vacuous answer … To say that “God made the world” is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance.

Our methods of communication with our fellow men take many forms. We share with other animals the ability to transmit information by such diverse means as the posture of our bodies, by the movements of our eyes, head, arms, and hands, and by our utterances of non-specific sounds. But we go far beyond any other species on earth in that we have evolved sophisticated forms of pictorial representation, elaborate spoken and written languages, ingenious methods of recording music and language on discs, on magnetic tape and in a variety of other kinds of code.

Partly because of improved technology, partly because of the pressures of inflation, partly from causes few understand or agree about, prices have soared. A Spitfire cost £5000 in 1940. A Tornado Air Defence Fighter costs £14 million today. That is a lot of inflation! And even when all has been said about the greater effectiveness of the latter machine, so that far fewer are needed, there still remains a mighty problem. There tend to be limits to the extent to which numbers can be reduced by superior quality. A ship can only cover a certain amount of ocean, however sophisticated it may be; and the most formidable of tanks can’t do much beyond the limits of its commander’s sight. There is a minimum numerical requirement, and meeting it with equipment capable of taking on the enemy was already, in 1955, a source of worry.

The biggest danger we face is overfishing. We have too many boats out there. We literally could fish out our oceans, some scientists believe, in the next 40, 50, 60 years. We are trending in that direction. … Every year, for the first time in history, we catch fewer and fewer fish with more and more sophisticated boats going out trying to find them.

This [Republican] political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advanced and sophisticated nation.

We are more than just flesh and bones. There’s a certain spiritual nature and something of the mind that we can’t measure.… With all our sophisticated equipment, we cannot monitor or define it, and yet it’s there.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

What we do see through geological time is the emergence of more complex worlds. ... [W]hen within the animal we see the emergence of larger and more complex brains, sophisticated vocalizations, echolocation, electrical perception, advanced social systems including eusociality, viviparity, warm-bloodedness, and agriculture—all of which are convergent—then to me that sounds like progress.

When we are young, we think that science has to do with facts, with finding answers and solutions, and that it proceeds like an arrow from the primitive to the sophisticated, from mystery to light. But as we get older, we find that, while science does have to do with facts and laws, it has equally to do with wisdom.

Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.