It is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of men can escape from their neighbors and from their government, to go and live as they please in the wilderness. A truly isolated, small, and creative society will never again be possible on this planet.

Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.

[On Richard P. Feynman's live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.

Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.

It's us that's really amazing.