"I don't know anything about anything."

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong."

"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."

"I was at a party once, and some woman said to me, 'You're a scientist, you know all about radiation. How much radiation is in a banana?' I said, 'A banana has about 1/1000th of a milligram of radium i…"

"When I was in high school, I'd read about the great scientists and I was ashamed that I was not a great scientist. I used to think, 'What's the matter with me? I'm not a great scientist.'"