Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.