If you love what you do, you'll be your best at it compared to anything else you might have chosen as a career. Or at least you will love it more, and you won't lead a depressed day of your life.

Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen.

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.

In life and in the universe it's always best to keep looking up.

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me I got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. That's when we're going to fight... There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher 'that might not necessarily be true.' That's never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There's been this coexistence forever, so to have religious communities knocking down the science door, there's something wrong there.

I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

Not everyone is going to like science as a subject.