The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.

Nothing disturbs me more than the glorification of stupidity.

We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.

The words "question" and "quest" are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.