Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

[Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.

Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.

Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property.

A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.