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

To read is to voyage through time.

I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space.

At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.

Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us

One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.

Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.