What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

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

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.