No matter what I've published - and you can look it up, I've published quite a lot in science, quite a few books too - none of it's very important. All will be forgotten and in a few years time will be a few comments in eight-point type in footnotes at the bottom of the page somewhere.

I used to work for the World Health Organisation in poor countries all over the world - Bangladesh, Korea, the Philippines and India. You learn a whole range of things about how other people are living and try to connect with them to gain an understanding of where they're coming from.

I like travelling on my own. It means I'm completely free to think about what's around me.

I've been all over the world on my own because, as a scientist, you travel a great deal if your work is reasonably successful or published. I get invitations to go to all sorts of strange countries where I would mostly be by myself and just meet other people there, instead of having travelling companions.

Neuroscience is now a very important research area in biology. We are now understanding a lot more about brains in babies, as well as children and adults.

There were never any doctors in my family. But my grandparents and my mother had a strong social conscience that was formative.

It's hard to be a good doctor if you don't think about the social circumstances of who you're treating. There are many Tory doctors, but I think it's difficult to be a doctor and a genuine right-winger.

I don't believe in regretting - one should try to move on. My mum was good at that. She was deeply in love with my father, and he died when I was nine. She remarried, and her second husband died, too. I saw the grieving process she went through. My mother had this way of moving on. It was a fine trait.

I don't believe the fertilised egg can be equated with the sort of human life that you and I represent, or our children represent.

It's very clear from Biblical history and Jewish history that Jewish monotheism wasn't developed in an instant, that it became gradually the accepted norm. But undoubtedly, Jewish ancestors were polytheists.

Well I think fundamentally, what I think surprises me is the creationist movement, and the notion that somehow you can't believe in God if you believe in evolution. But I don't think there's anything in the Bible which prevents a recognition that evolution is a highly plausible way that we came to be here.

People make their own fates, and if enough of us make our fate to be space explorers, perhaps we can actually get some space exploration done.

The facts of the fossil record never justified denying poor people a healthy diet. The facts of the weather record do not justify denying poor people affordable energy. And no set of facts, whatever they may be, can justify denying scientists - or anyone else, for that matter - the right to free speech.

The Soviet Union used the exploitation of workers under capitalism as an agitational issue to subvert Western democracies even as it practiced slave labor at home.

Europe certainly needs a genuine conservative movement to combat the creeping bureaucratic collectivism that is stifling the human potential of the Continent.

Every dollar added to the price of oil weakens America and strengthens her enemies.

Every dollar cut from the price of oil weakens the enemies of freedom and strengthens America.

In August 1994, I was invited to have dinner with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. At that time, I was a senior engineer working for Martin Marietta Astronautics in Denver, where I had been responsible for inventing a new plan called 'Mars Direct.'

When people have their own money at stake, it's a lot easier to find and settle on practical, no-nonsense solutions to engineering problems than is ever the case in the complex and endless deliberations of a government bureaucracy.

The American people want and deserve a space program truly worthy of a nation of pioneers.

Trillions of dollars in out-of-control entitlement spending cannot be remedied by cuts in NASA, or even in the entire discretionary budget, defense included. Rather, the financial bleeding needs to be staunched where the hole is and nowhere else.

Despite being bailed out - in some cases repeatedly - by the public purse, the automakers have shown little public spirit.

We need to improve our horrible position within the petroleum game by eliminating the EPA and other crippling bureaucracies that have turned the U.S. from the game's biggest winners into its worst losers.

In addition to virtually banning methanol outright, the EPA has created regulations to prevent cars from being modified by small businesses to optimize their performance, including through the use of methanol.

The natural-gas industry is screaming for new markets, and there are only two sectors where these can be found: transportation and power generation.

The EPA could act to open the transportation-fuel market to vigorous competition from natural gas as well as coal, biomass, and trash, by legalizing methanol. This would force oil prices down, expand the economy, and create millions of jobs.

As one of its first acts after coming into existence, the EPA banned the vital pesticide DDT.

From 1859 to 1971, the U.S. oil industry grew virtually continuously, in the process serving mightily to drive our economy and win our wars. But that growth was stopped dead in 1971 and sent into decline thereafter, as the advent of the EPA and the accompanying National Environmental Policy Act made it increasingly difficult to drill.

The EPA must be forbidden to seize or destroy the property of any person until and unless such person has been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.

In the wake of the disaster caused by Tropical Storm Sandy, various allies of the Obama campaign have rushed to claim that the event was caused by anthropogenic global warming, thereby justifying the president's program of crushing the economy with regressive carbon taxes, a supposedly necessary measure to prevent future bad weather.

Weather systems are natural heat engines, and like all other heat engines, both natural and artificial, they are driven not by temperature per se, but by differences in temperature between one location and another.

No one can prevent hurricanes, but prosperous communities are much better able to withstand them than poor ones.

Some conservatives say that whether it's popular or unpopular, imposing strict limits on immigration is the right thing to do, and it must be defended.

The bedrock foundation of any rational immigration policy should be to benefit America rather than benefiting potential or existing immigrants, or any other specific group, whether favorable or antagonistic to them.

In any economy, the entire population is supported by the part of it that is working. All other things being equal, it thus follows that the most attractive acquisition a society can have is a young adult, whose childhood and education has already been paid for, but whose entire working life still lies ahead.

America is a country defined by a set of ideas, and when people choose to accept those ideas, they should be able to become Americans, as fully so as any - and perhaps more so than most - regardless of how recently they or their ancestors arrived upon our shores. This is the true American tradition, which as conservatives we must defend.

I own a small aerospace company that does some business with the U.S. government.

The relationship between carbon consumption and human well-being is causal, not coincidental.

There are many elements needed to secure economic growth. Certainly, people must be politically free to innovate, invest, build, and create things, and they must be incentivized to do so by knowing they can keep the rewards for their efforts.

Human population supplies the labor necessary for the creation of wealth; carbon supplies the matter and energy.

Economic growth must be the central issue because it is only through growth that the devastating threat of national bankruptcy can be averted. Furthermore, it is only by reviving American economic growth that the West's global predominance can be sustained, and peace and freedom kept secure around the world.

The more that energy costs, the less economic activity there can be.

What the world needs most for its stability, and what the U.S. needs for its national security, is economic growth, which is driven first and foremost by expanded carbon use.

Nothing could do more to help the world's poor than to make fossil fuels cheap and plentiful.

Nothing could do more harm to America's national security than a carbon-restricted, depressed economy that would make funding our military impossible.

The issue comes down to this: The NSA metadata-collection program costs lots of money, and had funds not been expended on it, they could have been used to support other programs that might have been far more effective in saving American lives.

Were the United States to pass a law requiring all cars to be methanol-capable flex-fuel vehicles, or simply repeal EPA regulations that prevent such conversions from being carried out privately, our immense natural-gas capacity could make a dramatic entrance into the liquid-fuel market.

The No. 1 purpose of the federal government is national defense.

Snowden and NSA leaders should be brought together face-to-face for questioning in public by a congressional investigatory committee, with both parties allowed to make their points and to counter the assertions of the other. If Snowden is lying, it will come out. If the NSA is lying, it will come out.

Fewer jobs, at lower pay. That's what Obamacare means.