The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

Sometimes I think man needs to feel a special position within nature, and this leads him to believe that he is either specially hated by other animals or specially cherished. Instead of the truth, which is that he's just another animal on the plain. A smart one, but just another animal.

All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don't you take it away from yourself.

Yes, you have cancer. Yes, your kids are on drugs. Yes, there is an elephant outside your tent. Now the question becomes, What are you going to do about it? Subsequent emotions may not be pleasant, but the hysteria stops. Hysteria accompanies an unwillingness to look at what is really going on; it promotes an unwillingness to look. We feel we are afraid to look, when actually it is not-looking that makes us afraid. The minute we look, we cease being afraid.

God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.

If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose -- the gambler is always ruined.

I hadn't traveled with the intention of learning about anything except myself. And the real point of all this travel was not what I had come to believe or disbelieve about the wider world, but what I had learned about myself.