The depth of experience fine wine can bring to a dinner, particularly a bottle that has been through the past 100 years, makes you take stock of your own life.

Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.

I try to keep this in mind when tied in to a rope 75 feet up in a tree... The history of ideas about our place in the universe has been a long series of let-downs for those who like to believe we are special.

My only hope is that every other alien civilization isn't doing exactly what we are doing because then everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.

The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?

Before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there's equal opportunity.

If you seek only easy problems to solve, then ultimately, there'll be nothing about you to distinguish yourself from others.