Robert B. Laughlin

"Oklahoma is laid back and rather beautiful, with rolling brown hills not unlike the ones in California. The Pershing missiles, on the other hand, were not beautiful. They were horrible weapons of war …"

"The world is full of intelligent, well-meaning people who, for one reason or another, did not attend university but are nonetheless well-read and educated. Out there on the prairie lost opportunities …"

"Bell Labs had been a kind of holy place of solid state physics since the 1950's when it was built up by Shockley after the invention of the transistor. I had no idea at the time of the significance of…"

"My rule is simply to do for my students exactly what I hope someone else will do for my sons when the time comes: I teach them to have faith in themselves and in their own compass, to listen to nature…"

"If you think, as a Western person, that you are not affected by religious traditions, you are sadly mistaken."

"I learned about X-ray diffraction, neutron scattering, raman scattering, infrared absorption spectroscopy, heat capacity, transport, time-dependent transport, magnetic resonance, electron diffraction,…"

"It has been my experience that good theoretical physics is empowering, in that it enables thinking to take place that would otherwise not occur, and, in its highest form, facilitates experiments that …"

"Science is about measurement, dammit — it's not about ideas."