The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

The fact that someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean it's true.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.

I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars.... And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light.... The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged.

My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.