“Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemi...”

“we could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart”

“Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into ...”

“We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, an...”

“Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't r...”

“If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what's known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, ...”

“The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in...”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”

“I like indoor Christmas trees. And I like people who decorate their homes with lights and all that crap. I think it's a healthy outlet for them. If they weren't covering their lawns with twinkling ...”

“I'm still a Chicagoan in the fact that I can't do Christmas with sand and palm trees. It just doesn't compute - it's not Christmas unless your face hurts when you step outside.”

“Being half Jewish, we grew up with Christmas trees but had Jewish ornaments.”