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

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight-conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds-brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.

If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world.

The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.