The greatest teachers are the ones that turn a B student into an A student, or a failing student into a B student.

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

Curiosity is missing. Curiosity in particular is something that the system, not only the educational system but, the parental... what you do as a parent at home.

The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations. And there's Columbus - he couldn't even get Italy to pay for his voyage so he has to go to Spain.

We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life.

We only recently figured out the origin of our own moon. And we have some idea of how the Sun and Earth formed, but that's only because modern telescopes empower us to see other stars and planets freshly hatched within gas clouds across the galaxy. As for the origin of life itself, the transition from inanimate molecules to what any of us would call life remains one of the great frontiers of biology.

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.