Life existed on Earth for nearly four billion years before anything remotely resembling a human being showed up. And even then, when we started to branch off from other apes about 10,000,000 years ago, our ancestors looked pretty different.

My interest in the space program has a certain purity to it because I recognize the romance of it but I was never seduced by it. That allowed me to view it through a more purely scientific lens. My interest in space while in school came about through my scientific activities.

If there's a Devil, that mean's there's a God.

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.

I think the material that inspires artists is the fabric of the soul of civilization.

Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?

There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?