“If I had foreseen Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would have torn up my formula in 1905.”

Booknotes interview (1994)
Context: I react to what is necessary. I would like to eschew any formula. There are some things where the government is absolutely inevitable, which we cannot get along without comprehensive state action. But there are many things — producing consumer goods, producing a wide range of entertainment, producing a wide level of cultural activity — where the market system, which independent activity is also important, so I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I'm for that. Where the government is necessary, I'm for that. I'm deeply suspicious of somebody who says, "I'm in favor of privatization," or, "I'm deeply in favor of public ownership." I'm in favor of whatever works in the particular case.

"Walt's Profit Formula: Dream, Diversity, and Never Miss an Angle" in Wall Street Journal (4 February 1958)

Quoted by Harry Slochower in "Julius Bahnsen, Philosopher of Heroic Despair, 1830-1881" (1932), The Philosophical Review, 41(4), p. 372

The evolutionary modification of genetic phenomena. Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of Genetics 1, 165-72, 1932.
1930s

"On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools", an address in (16 April 1886), published in Popular Scientific Lectures (1898), as translated by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 367
19th century

The Origins of Art (1966)
Other Quotes
Context: What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form. Form, which we discover in nature by analysis, is obstinately mathematical in its manifestations—which is to say that creation in art requires thought and deliberation. But this is not to say that form can be reduced to a formula. In every work of art it must be re-created, but that too is true of every work of nature. Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed.

On an article by Qunta magazine(when asked: Is there one big question that has always guided you?) https://www.quantamagazine.org/michael-atiyahs-mathematical-dreams-20160303
Context: I always want to try to understand why things work. I’m not interested in getting a formula without knowing what it means. I always try to dig behind the scenes, so if I have a formula, I understand why it’s there. And understanding is a very difficult notion. People think mathematics begins when you write down a theorem followed by a proof. That’s not the beginning, that’s the end. For me the creative place in mathematics comes before you start to put things down on paper, before you try to write a formula. You picture various things, you turn them over in your mind. You’re trying to create, just as a musician is trying to create music, or a poet. There are no rules laid down. You have to do it your own way. But at the end, just as a composer has to put it down on paper, you have to write things down. But the most important stage is understanding. A proof by itself doesn’t give you understanding. You can have a long proof and no idea at the end of why it works. But to understand why it works, you have to have a kind of gut reaction to the thing. You’ve got to feel it.

This principle is comprehensive, extending to both domestic and foreign policy of our country. This approach ensured consistency in all spheres of Kazakhstan's development, i.e. from economic reforms to building pragmatic relations with partners in the international arena.
"Speech At Moscow State University" https://www.akorda.kz/en/speeches/external_political_affairs/ext_speeches_and_addresses/speech-of-the-president-of-kazakhstan-nursultan-nazarbayev-at-the-lomonosov-moscow-state-university (2014)

Financial Times. November 23, 2004
Bernie Ecclestone responding to the banks holding a trial to determine if he should continue controlling Formula One Holdings and its subsidiares including Formula One Management.