If I had to make the welfare decision again tomorrow, I’d sign it again tomorrow. We had a 60 percent reduction in the welfare rolls. We had an enormous percentage of poor people move into the workforce, start middle-class lifestyles, and when we had a brief tech recession of six months in 2001, after I left office, people who had moved from welfare to work were less likely to be laid off than the general working population. So I would do it again.

Too often women are told not to be ambitious. Girls are told not to be ambitious, to just fit in, don’t rock the boat, be happy and grateful for what you already have. And it’s like—no, the only way things change is if we start demanding what we deserve.

There was very much a real feel that we probably pretty much discovered every major fossil field in Africa. And in fact, some scientists even wrote that down at the turn of the millennia. It wasn’t a great time to be proposing to explore and push new, because we hadn’t succeeded, theoretically, being given the chance. All the big discoveries were in old sites. ... I was still an extraordinary believer in that there was more out there to be discovered. I just wasn’t demonstrating.

I’ve been mortally opposed to the so-called life-and-death committees that were instituted. When there were many more patients that needed to be dialyzed, and not enough artificial kidneys available, you had the institution of the life-and-death committees. ... Depending on the answer to these questions, he could be dialyzed. Otherwise, he could go to hell. I’ve been mortally opposed to that. When I set up a dialysis center here with a grant from some government agency, I was forced to put in a life-and-death committee, but it never met.

I never listened to any noise around me. I listened only to my gut feeling and did what I should have

Diversifying means going abroad…Be in another culture, speak a different language, see how other people think. Leave and then come back.

The achievement is not the Nobel, the achievement is the science.

I always chose to surround myself with good people no matter my career. I picked teachers and mentors who promised me a hard life.

I wanted to be a physician. And I am a physician, so I fulfilled that dream. I did not know anything about science. I did not know what one was supposed to do in science. I wanted to be a doctor, and I became indeed a doctor.

I think that it is necessary to implant in children the love for science from the very beginning, and mostly the love for asking questions about the universe, for example why does the sun rise in the morning? Or what allows life on earth? Why earth is so unique compared to the moon? Or about our own body and evolution: what happened to us?