If you find life on Europa [Jupiter's moon], like, what would you call it? Would it be, like, Europeans?

Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life.

The limits on your enlightenment come not from the age you stopped going to school but from the age you stopped being curious.

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.

If Pizza sizes were given in area not diameter, you'd see instantly that a 7 inch is less than half the size of a 10 inch pie

I'm often asked whether I believe in Global Warming. I now just reply with the question: "Do you believe in Gravity?"

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.