Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want . . . but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy . . . try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.

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

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.