One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media is reassuring people it's alright not to know anything. That to me is far more dangerous than a little pornography on the Internet.

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

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.

When you buy a used car, you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you do not feel yourself an expert in automobile engines, you bring a friend who is. And you do this with something as unimportant as an automobile. But on the issues of the transcendent, of ethics, of morals, of the origins of the world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny?

We are all star stuff.