Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance.

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

The universe is a put-up job.

It seems to be a characteristic of all great work that it creators wear a cloak of imprecision.

I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.

It is emphatically the case that life could not arise spontaneously in a primeval soup of any kind.... Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup ever existed on this planet. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario the myth of the pre-biotic soup.

Outstanding examples of genius - a Mozart, a Shakespeare, or a Carl Friedrich Gauss - are markers on the path along which our species appears destined to tread.