Super-ambitious goals tend to be unifying and energizing to people; but only if they believe there's a chance of success.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.

When cars have the sensory systems around them, GPS intelligence, they're looking at the world not only in visual spectrum, but infrared, ultraviolet and everything else that's going on and they've got reaction times in microseconds. Not a tenth of a second. They're a hundred thousand times faster.

Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster. ... I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.

My father, who grew up picking olives on the Greek island of Lesbos, was a doctor. So my family expected me to become a physician.