My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.

We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

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.

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.