"In 1994 an amazing thing happened. The phone rings and it is Professor Sheila Widnall of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of MIT. She said, "Do you know anyone who wants to be Chief Scientist of the Air Force? And by the way, if you are interested let me know." She had been chosen to be Secretary of the Air Force, and she was looking for her Chief Scientist. I thought about it briefly, told her yes, and stayed for three years."

“I think the only way is the way human culture has gotten there. We transmit our knowledge via cultural artifacts called texts. It used to be manuscripts, then it was printed text, now it’s electronic text. We put our young people through a lot of reading to absorb the knowledge of our culture. You don’t go out and experience chemistry, you study chemistry.”

“I don’t believe there is a general pattern recognition problem. I believe that pattern recognition, like most of human reasoning, is domain specific. Cognitive acts are surrounded by knowledge of the domain, and that includes acts of inductive behavior. So I don’t really put much hope in "general anything" for AI. In that sense I have been very much aligned with Marvin Minsky’s view of a "society of mind." I’m very much oriented toward a knowledge-based model of mind.”

“Our group, the Heuristic Programming Project, did path-breaking work in the large, unexplored wilderness of all the great scientific theories we could possibly have. But most of that beautiful wilderness today remains largely unexplored. Am I am happy with where we have gotten in induction research? Absolutely not, although I am proud of the few key steps we took that people will remember.”

“That convinced me to get very serious about archives, including my own. If you’re interested in discoveries and the history of ideas, and how to manufacture ideas by computer, you’ve got to treat this historical material as fundamental data. How did people think? What alternatives were being considered? Why was the movement from one idea to another preposterous at one time and then accepted”

“When I was younger, I was too busy for history and not cognizant of the importance of it. As I got older and began to see my own career unfolding, I began to realize the impact of the ideas of others on my ideas. I became more and more of a history buff.”

“The great thing about being retired is not that you work less hard, but that what you do is inner-directed. The world has so many things you want to know before you’re out of here that you have a lot to do.”