There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things.

Anyone who has wrestled knows that it's the hardest thing in the world to do. Anyone who says something else is the hardest thing has never wrestled. That's what I have found. ... You don't wrestle because it's easy, you wrestle because it's hard. I don't do astrophysics because it's easy, I do it because it's hard. And I juxtapose the two in my mind, body, and soul all the time.

Essentially every scientist, when posed with the question, "If you want to get science knowledge from Mars, do you want to send a geologist or do you want to send a robot?" Well, the real answer is, you can send 100 robots for the price of sending one geologist, so let's send 100 robots to 100 different locations, and then we would all benefit. So that's the answer you would get. And I agree with that answer.

One thing in life is for certain, the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.

If factual information upsets you, then you are creating a world that is not embracing objective truths, and that's not how you advance a democracy.

If there were biologists among the extremophiles organisms that live in extreme conditions, they would surely classify themselves as normal and any life that thrived in room temperature as an extremophile.

Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine