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.

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.