Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow

I believe in a kind of God. I think all scientists, in a way, believe in a certain God, in a certain order of nature.

I just really loved films and thought I should be writing screenplays.

We routinely participate in elaborate nonverbal exchanges even when we are not consciously aware of doing so.

When judging a product, we rarely have exhaustive scientific data to go by. As a result, if we are to form a complete picture, we must fill in the blanks, just as we must in our visual perception.

If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.

Listeners instinctively detect that when we lower the usual pitch of our voice, we are sad, and when we raise it, we are angry or fearful.

The pitch, timbre, volume, speed, and cadence of your voice, the speed with which you speak, and even the way you modulate pitch and loudness, are all hugely influential factors in how convincing you are and how people judge your state of mind and character.

Expressive speech, with modulation in pitch and volume, and a minimum of noticeable pauses, boosts credibility and enhances the impression of intelligence.

We perceive, we remember our experiences, we make judgments, we act - and in all of these endeavors, we are influenced by factors that we aren't aware of.

Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer.

I always liked movies, so I started writing for Hollywood, but my day job was physics.

The attacks on global warming are no different than the attacks the cigarettes companies used to use to say that cigarettes don't cause cancer.

One thing that feeds into the way you experience the social world is your mood - and one thing that affects your mood is the weather.

I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct.

In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws.

I believe there is true expertise in some endeavors, and not in others. There is obviously no such thing as expertise in predicting the results of coin tosses, but there is expertise in predicting the behavior of lasers.

The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs.

most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

That's why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set—the set of people who don't give up.

Robert Frost wrote in 1914, "Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true.

Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.

true randomness sometimes produces repetition

Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years," and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, "That's exactly what I mean about wasting your time.

The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth.