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.

The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe.

When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there's nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy.

When I was a kid, I thought that if everyone looked up the way I did then everyone would want to study the universe just like me - how could they not? This naiveté is what tells me that my interest was more a calling than a rational comparative assessment about what to be when I grew up.

When we went to the moon and realized that the Soviet Union had no realistic plans of getting to the moon, then we stopped going to the moon.

I've known from long ago that the universe was calling me. If you were one of those annoying adults that said, 'Oh, what are you gonna be when you grow up?' I would say, 'Astrophysicist .' And then they'd walk away real quickly.

Science is not a subject you took in school. It's life. We are wrapped by it, in it, with it.