But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten-thousand year… - Jacob Bronowski

Christopher Columbus discovered the West Indies, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We do not call their achievements creations because they are not personal enough. The West Indies were there all the time; and as for the telephone, we feel that Bell's ingenious thought was somehow not fundamental. The groundwork was there, and if not Bell then someone else would have stumbled on the telephone almost as accidently as on the West Indies.

A good prediction is one which defines its area of uncertainty; a bad prediction ignores it.

[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature — a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules — out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.