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 the smell of the universe in the morning.

If you look at Einstein's equations and put in low speeds and low gravity, they become Newton's equations.

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.

If there's something that someone else can do, let them do it. If I couldn't do it uniquely, let someone else do it and I would get back to the lab.

It's odd that the word 'atheist' even exist. I don't play golf, is there a word for non-golf players ?

We still refer to sunrise, sunset. That only has meaning if you think that Earth is in the center of things, and everything is moving around us. So even though we know intellectually Earth goes around the sun, the language is still pre-Copernican, as we would call it.