I wake up and I go to work. I don't look for the cup of coffee. The universe is enough of a draw for me - to awaken me and have me bound out of bed and go to my office.

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.

I love being wrong because that means in that instant, I learned something new that day.

Here's the problem, when you're stargazing on a mountain top you are partially oxygen-deprived and you're in command of million dollars worth of hardware. So as much as I would like to sip wine under the stars, it's contraindicated in the instructions on operating telescopes.

There is a growing awareness that we're losing our technological competitive edge. I think there's an awareness that we're losing our leadership, and that maybe our self image over the past several decades has been a little bit delusional.

I [do not know] when the end of science will come. ... What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves. This limit of our mental faculties, and not necessarily of science itself, ensures to me that we have only just begun to figure out the universe.

UFO (Unidentified Flying Object)sightings are not higher among amateur astronomers than they are in the general public. In fact, they're lower. You say, why is that so? Well, because we know what the hell we're looking at!