I've always been interested in pop culture. Some of my colleagues think of pop culture as beneath them, or there's the ivory tower and then there's everybody else, and I never could buy into that wall that's been put up by so many people over the decades and even the centuries.

The value of the space program is beyond science, it's beyond military; it's a cultural shift in how we think of our place in the universe.

If Neptune were analogized with a Chevy Impala in mass, then how big is pluto compared to that? Pluto would be a matchbox car sitting on the curb.

I was raised Catholic. But if someone says I was raised in some religion, that's insufficient information to actually know what was going on. The real question is Was the religion in the household? The answer is no. Important decisions in the household were executed rationally and secularly. So as a result, the foundations of my reasoning derive not from religion but from the rational analysis of circumstances.

Who you are, where you've been and what you've done is all up here, captured and preserved in your memories. If you lost that - the story of your own origins - you'd lose your identity, your sense of self.

The last person I ever want working for me is someone who says 'that's not in my job description.

It seems that we're better at finding someone to blame for our problems than we are at finding creative solutions to fix them.