"The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box."

"It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all."

"Clara Winter,' he said. 'You are a word person and don't ever forget it.'He was right. He knew. He could tell. It's something that can be sensed. There's a difference between word-people and non-word-people."

"The fact is: Jesus wrote not a solitary word that survives. Equally astounding is historical silence: not a single historical account refers to him during his lifetime from any source whatsoever, Roman or Jewish, official or personal."

"The idea would be in my mind - and I know it sounds strange - is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that's exceeding what we can even use. It'll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together."

"I think the rules where different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn't care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes."