Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else.

We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.