Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.

Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

I'm a fan of the planets in any combination. When I was born, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Sun, and the Moon were all in the sky.

If each dead person became a ghost, there'd be more than 100 billion of them haunting us all. Creepy, but cool.

People say, oh we just need charismatic leaders to continue on to Mars. Now we've gone to the moon, of course Mars is next. No. Mars was never, of course, next. It is next if you think we went to the moon because we're explorers, but if you know we went to the moon because we were at war then we're never going to Mars. There's no military reason to do it, to justify the expenditure.