"There is no foundational mathematical or physical reason the relationship between Pythagorean and tempered western music should exist. It just does. The rich flexibility of the tempered scale and the … bountiful archives of western music are a testimonial to this wonderful coincidence provided by nature."

"For the record, I don’t deserve this. But I have lower back pain and don’t deserve that either. (After being listed as one of the twenty most brilliant living Christian Professors.)"

"Science packages theory, places it on a throne, and honors and protects it much like a queen. Engineers make the queen come down from the throne and scrub the floor. And if she doesn’t work, we fire her."

"Christians are being subjected to the same “separate but equal” discrimination used to justify discrimination in the old Jim Crow south."

"Forecasting the future of technology is risky. Predictions tend to be linear whereas technical advances come in quantum jumps from paradigm shifts. After the second World War, forecasters in electronics [who did not foresee the transistor] would have linearly [and incorrectly] foretasted breakthroughs in better vacuum tube reliability from, for example, improved filament chemistry."

"All engineering fields are either solutions looking for problems or problems looking for solutions."

"Engineers actually design things. This is why [many] engineers are interested in the area of intelligent design."

"If "knowledge puffs up," then we professors are in ever-present danger of having egos resembling threatened blow fish."

"Is it wrong to pray for God to make me more successful so that I can be more humble?"

"Computers are no more able to create information than iPods are capable of creating music."

"[On Chaitin's Constant:] Chaiton's work in identifying it is an intellectually stunning piece of mathematics with the clear philosophical and theological implication that our universe is not fully explainable in materialist terms."

"We are more than computers made out of meat. We have a soul, we have a spirit and we have a mind."

"AI [artificial intelligence] is like a toddler with a Ph.D.. It’s really smart, but it still needs to be supervised."

"Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations."

"I was the all-American boy, the Eagle Scout. I remember I was at my girlfriend's apartment, and there were these strange publications like The Nation and The New Republic. I started looking at them and thought, "Gee, this is weird; people saying things against America?" It was an awakening. On the East Coast, I'd never even heard of conscientious objectors."

"It was a face which darkness could kill in an instant"

"The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality"

"In this country … men seem to live for action as long as they can and sink into apathy when they retire."

"More than all, and above all, Washington was master of himself. If there be one quality more than another in his character which may exercise a useful control over the men of the present hour, it is the total disregard of self when in the most elevated positions for influence and example."

"It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war."

"… life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it's as though you aren't there."

"The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values."

"I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be."

"One of the most basic things I've tried to do is give people a greater understanding of how science works - the importance of evidence, the importance of many trials, of rigorous studies, and the idea that we learn only a little bit at a time. . . . Making people aware of that process helps increase appreciation and respect for science, and that helps us make informed decisions for our families and ourselves."

"You don't put statistics on trial, you put individuals on trial."

"My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six."

"Plays also, but musicals particularly—the last collaborator is your audience. So you got to wait until the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration. And when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. And things that seem to work well, work in the sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece, suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional, or a little overlong, or a little overweight, or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping in front of an audience."

"There's a place for us, Somewhere a place for us Peace and quiet and open air wait for us, Somewhere. There's a time for us, Some day a time for us Time together with time to spare, time to look, time to care, Someday. Somewhere we'll find a new way of living. We'll find a way of forgiving, Somewhere.'"

"Without question, Steve is the best Broadway lyricist, past or present."

"I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it."

"Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America."

"Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse."

"Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot."

"The bad debater never knows that one explanation is better than five."

"The one kind of society that the Church cannot adjust to is no society at all, i.e., a setup where community has become so fragmented that a communal religion is a fiction, sustained only by talk and make-news items in the press and television."

"Through the burgeoning university network, it was suddenly possible to think of oneself as a national poet, even if the nation turned out to consist entirely of English departments."

"A deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism."

"Off she'd go to the hospital, a place I believe she secretly liked because they treat you like a child there."

"It is a fallacy to think that carping is the strongest form of criticism: the important work begins after the artist's mistakes have been pointed out, and the reviewer can't put it off indefinitely with sneers, although some neophytes might be tempted to try: "When in doubt, stick out your tongue" is a safe rule that never cost one any readers. But there's nothing strong about it, and it has nothing to do with the real business of criticism, which is to do justice to the best work of one's time, so that nothing gets lost."

"Not that there weren't real communists in the labor unions, and real spies in Washington, but these had nothing to do with the show that was being put on for us, which seemed entirely designed to Make Us Take This Thing Seriously. From abroad, where I was for much of the time, it looked as if the United States were trying to act like a superpower by holding its very own show trials."

"Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy — but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery."

"As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives."

"As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place."

"Chicago 1968 taught one how close any civilized country is to berserkness at all times; also how terrorism, even silly terrorism, strengthens the cops more than anyone. Yet already this European-style history lesson has been watered down by consensus into something crazy we did in the sixties, just as we "did" McCarthyism in the fifties. As if a nation changes its nature completely every ten years; as if social forces were as evanescent as hula hoops or skateboards, instead of as remorseless as glaciers."

"This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn't take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man."

"He was truly after an art in which the creator could be as intelligent as he liked, but in which intelligence must be transmuted entirely into form, so that no lumps of thinking are left showing."