Astronomers are pure of heart and appealingly puerile. They look into the midnight sky and ask big questions, just as we did when we were in college: Who are we? Where do we come from? And why are we standing around outside on the night before finals, do we want to end up making elevator parts for a living like our father or what?

The surest and most insidious enemy of freedom is not dictatorship, but complacency.

I may not believe in life after death, but what a gift it is to be alive now.

The beauty of the natural world lies in the details.

[On women:] We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least - call it a mechanospiritual sense - we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.

Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.

I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me.