Some things are as they are regardless of what they were.

History is full of people who thought they were right -- absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

Apparently, a great deal of dark, unseen material exists, whose gravitational pull is responsible for the motions of the stars and galaxies that we see.

We are just strings of quarks living in a suburb of the local density maximum of the universe.

There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.

There was no "before" the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.