Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

"Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity."

"What neurology tells us is that the self consists of many components, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion."

"Your "conscious life" is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons."

"Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don't feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence."

"Any ape can reach for a banana, but only a human can reach for the stars or even know what that means."

"Whether a country is to be called 'civilised' or not, depends not on how affluent the upper 10 per cent are, but how well they treat the lower 10 per cent."