When or if answers are found, you can be assured those answers will lead to more questions. Is the troubling or wonderful? It depends on your view of your place in nature, your place among the stars; I suppose.

Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.

But investment in space stimulates society, it stimulates it economically, it stimulates it intellectually, and it gives us all passion.

I hope climate science becomes the big thing. And then what I want is electrical engineers to solve the world's energy problems, energy distribution problems. I want mechanical engineers to make better transportation systems. I want chemical engineers to develop better solar panels, and so on.

As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often, 'When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.’ And I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science. It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I’ve never seen before. It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself.

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That's just crazy.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.