Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.
What a marvelous cooperative arrangement – plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.
Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.
You have to know the past to understand the present.
Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.
There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy.
Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.
Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
The visions we offer our children shape the future.
It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.
Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.