"Many of us believed in the possibility of a principled explanation for the laws of nature. We hoped to discover a short list of principles, which could be realized in a unique theory, which would retrodict the standard model and uniquely predict the physics to be discovered beyond it. The shocking implication of the results of Strominger reported in 1986 was that it was not to be, at least within the confines of string theory. ...String theory offered more, however... It offered the promise of a setting in which the different perturbative string theories are realized as expansions around solutions of a still more fundamental theory. ...That more fundamental theory would have to be background independent..."

“String theory seems to be incompatible with a world in which a cosmological constant has a positive sign, which is what the observations indicate.”

“We are the result of processes much more complicated than the small aspects of our lives and societies over which we have some control.”

“There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. ...Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. ...If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.”

“Time is described only in terms of change in the network of relationships that describes space.”

“In quantum theory, distance is inverse to energy, because you need particles of very high energy to probe very short distances. The inverse of the Planck energy is the Planck length.”

“While most people... were seeking to modify the principles of either relativity or quantum theory, we surprised ourselves by succeeding in putting them together without modifying their principles.”