"We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it."

"Clearly there’s some entity that doesn’t really include us, the professors and students, and doesn’t really protect our academic freedom, I think, the way that it should."

"It's a fantastically specialized universe, but how in the world did it happen?"

"I feel that very rarely have I done any work in my life. I have a good time. I'm exploring. I'm playing a game, solving puzzles, and having fun, and for some reason people have been willing to pay me for it. Officially, I was supposed to retire years ago, but retire from what? Why stop having a good time?"

"It’s not even probable, let alone scientifically proven, that HIV causes AIDS. If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There are no such documents."

"People keep asking me, "You mean you don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS?" And I say, "Whether I believe it or not is irrelevant! I have no scientific evidence for it." I might believe in God, and He could have told me in a dream that HIV causes AIDS. But I wouldn’t stand up in front of scientists and say, "I believe HIV causes AIDS because God told me." I’d say, "I have papers here in hand and experiments that have been done that can be demonstrated to others." It’s not what somebody believes, it’s experimental proof that counts. And those guys don’t have that."

"I once heard, and I think it is true, that only one man in the world—some Indian mathematician—understood the mathematics of string theory in eleven-dimensional space, and he dreamed it."

"Years from now, people will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find those who excommunicated Galileo."