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

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. ... Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?