The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we’re here. And that’s astonishing. And that we can understand that, that’s the most astonishing.

There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as "we"; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm.

From an evolutionary standpoint you can't just wipe everything out and start over, and I don't think you can do it in the school system either.

I like to regard myself as someone who's capable of critical thought, that is to say, who can evaluate claims.

Everybody remembers numbers and computers remember numbers. People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedures. But the other thing that's still important is that your perception as a human is affected subtly by all this stuff that you can't quite articulate. You run your life according to all this stuff that's happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there's adaptive software and things, but it's more literal.

If you want grown-ups to recycle, just tell their kids the importance of recycling, and they'll be all over it.

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don't have enough dopamine to feel good. So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive behavior to get more dopamine. The strange thing is that it works with what we think of as uppers and downers and whatever you call gambling - sidewaysers.