You can’t regulate every lab in the world.

In the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.

The IRS! They’re like the Mafia, they can take anything they want!

In California, we have some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. While it is easy to conceive of innovation and regulation as mutually exclusive, California is proof that we can do both. We can innovate responsibly.

In theory, the MSRB is supposed to protect the public interest, investors, and state and local governments. In practice, the MSRB membership structure is more shaded toward protecting the financial professionals who broker the deals.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained in arms, is the best most natural defense of a free country.

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.

When individual members of the team are highly disciplined, they can be trusted and, therefore, allowed to operate with very little oversight.

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.

When grand plans for scientific and defence technologies are made, do the people in power think about the sacrifices the people in the laboratories and fields have to make?

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

When I’m making an American film, it’s more safe because there are so many people on the set to watch me. Whatever I do, they say, ‚What are you doing!? Tell me first!‘ There are so many restrictions.

Investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

It is well known that the Soviet Union closely regulates all organizations and movements, including religion.

You have no ability, if you’re a financial institution and you’re threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.

You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.

If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It’s billions to tens of billions.

Taste cannot be controlled by law.

What we have to find is the right level of regulation of our financial system so that it has the incentive to invest in things, but at the same time, it is sufficiently regulated so it can’t get in the kind of trouble that we have seen in the past and we have seen recently.