I hope that every [person] at one point in their life has the opportunity to have something that is at the heart of their being, something so central to their being that if they lose it they won't feel they're human anymore, to be proved wrong because that's the liberation that science provides. The realization that to assume the truth, to assume the answer before you ask the questions leads you nowhere.

The root cause of the looming energy problem - and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health - is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.

We all trust each other to some extent. We have to rely on experts to some extent, but we should learn to be sceptical.

Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday's newspaper.

Occam's razor suggests that, if some event is physically plausible, we don't need recourse to more extraordinary claims for its being. Surely the requirement of an all-powerful deity who somehow exists outside of our universe, or multiverse, while at the same time governing what goes on inside it, is one such claim. It should thus be a claim of last, rather than first, resort.

The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.

Science is not just there for technology. It's part of what addressing who you are in the universe and understanding your place in the cosmos. Good art, good literature, good music - all of that is for that and science is a part of it.