Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

You will find men like him in all of the world's religions. They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy a religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistance of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.

Only small minds are impressed by large numbers.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.