“It is time now to introduce my friend Peter Duesberg. Where do I begin? At NIH, Peter is sometimes known as the battling bulldog. He gets his teeth into something and 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years later those teeth are still sunk in it…[…]…He began working with retroviruses. Peter the biochemist. This really led to the first molecular and genetically defined transforming gene, the Src gene. A great deal of this brilliant and original, the real critical aspects, was and Blood Transfusion vol.29 p. 1, 1985.”

“Why waste time doing experiments in the organization with technologies that are going to be out of date in 5 years or 10 years?”

“I made those films for 20 years, and after 10 years they ran out of good scripts.”

“I enjoyed the comedies with Alec Guinness, and I had a real great time with Peter Ustinov in Hotel Sahara. I found I had the ability to do comedy. My timing was really inborn.”

“Paul then, in the fourteenth year of Nero on the same day with Peter, was beheaded at Rome for Christ's sake and was buried in the Ostian way, the twenty-seventh year after our Lord's passion.”
Hic ergo quarto decimo Neronis anno, eodem die quo Petrus Romae, pro Christo capite truncatur, sepultusque est in via Ostiensi, anno post passionem Domini tricesimo septimo.

“Peter. Peter Kavinsky.” Even saying his name is a remembered pleasure, something to savor, like a piece of chocolate dissolving on my tongue.”

“Sokolov put the odds at 100 percent that Peter would, sooner or later, do something stupid and cause enormous trouble. Peter would do this because he believed he was clever and because he thought only of himself. It would be safer to take him out and shoot him now, but disposing of the body would be difficult and the shock of it would probably disturb the equilibrium of Zula.”

“The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.”

“Full twenty times was Peter feared,
For once that Peter was respected.”

“[The engineer] must identify the significant and critical problems, but in his education, problems have been predetermined and assigned. He must develop the judgment to know what solutions to problems are possible, but in school the problems encountered are known to have answers. He should be excited by new and unsolved challenges, but for 20 years he has lived in an educational system where he knows he is repeating the work of last year's students.”