Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven. . . . My message certainly is not one of complacency. In this I agree with the doomsayers: our world needs the best efforts of all humanity to improve our lot.

All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across.

This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.

We now have in our hands—really, in our libraries—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years.

Letting the religious right teach ID in schools is like letting the Marines teach poetry in advanced combat training. As a scientist, I see these the relevancy between the two sets to be equal. If Kansas is going to mess up like this, the least it can do is not be hypocritical and allow equal time for other alternative "theories" like FSMism, which is by far the tastier choice.

The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.

The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom.