Authority in science exists to be questioned, since heresy is the spring from which new ideas flow.

Faced with the admitted difficulty of managing the creative process, we are doubling our efforts to do so. Is this because science has failed to deliver, having given us nothing more than nuclear power, penicillin, space travel, genetic engineering, transistors, and superconductors? Or is it because governments everywhere regard as a reproach activities they cannot advantageously control? They felt that way about the marketplace for goods, but trillions of wasted dollars later, they have come to recognize the efficiency of this self-regulating system. Not so, however, with the marketplace for ideas.

I knew, however, that it would cost ten times what I had available in order to build a molecular beam machine. I decided to follow a byway, rather than the highway. It is a procedure I have subsequently recommended to beginning scientists in this country, where research strategy is best modelled on that used by Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham.
(British General James Wolfe defeated the French defending Quebec in 1759 after scaling a cliff for a surprise attack.)

Idealism is the highest form of reason.

It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists)... despise utility. But because. .. useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.
Concerning the allocation of research funds.

It takes a trained and discerning researcher to keep the goal in sight, and to detect evidence of the creeping progress toward it.

Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.

Science is an enterprise that can only flourish if it puts the truth ahead of nationality, ethnicity, class and color.

[Intellectual courage is] the quality that allows one to believe in one's judgement in the face of disappointment and widespread skepticism. Intellectual courage is even rarer than physical courage.