At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

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

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean.

When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science.

In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!

We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.

I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said "billion" many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said "billions and billions." For one thing, it's too imprecise. How many billions are "billions and billions"? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? "Billions and billions" is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked-and sure enough, I never said it.