Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.

The illegality of cannabis is outrageous.

I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.