I think we will make it. Because one quality people have - certainly Americans have it - is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

Women are extraordinary in lacking the estrus, or period of heat. The females of most other primate species become sexually active, to the point of aggression, only at the time of ovulation. Why has sexual responsiveness become nearly continuous? Unusually frequent sexual activity between males and females served as the principle device for cementing the pair bond.

Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive.

And pigs may fly. And we may be able to terraform and send surface populations to Mars. And Jesus may come next week anyway, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. All these crazy things run through people's minds.