I want and need the artist to take me to new places, and the new place that Van Gogh took me not the sky as it is but the sky as he felt it. And the more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

If Neptune were analogized with a Chevy Impala in mass, then how big is pluto compared to that? Pluto would be a matchbox car sitting on the curb.

Do you realize that the 850 billion dollar bank bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. And so when someone says, 'We don't have enough money for this space probe.' No, it's not that you don't have enough money. It's that the distribution of money that you're spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.

I want upon death to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth.

I have a multivolume history of the world from the 19th century that begins with Noah's flood as though it's as historical a fact as the rise and fall of Rome.

It's my duty to enlighten people.

You could be a poet, an artist, a comedian - if you're in the culture of innovation then you embrace those who do and you're going to protect the science curriculum in the classroom because you understand the meaning and the value of it. And science discoveries don't scare you. You say, "Give me more science", not less. "Give me more technology", not less.