It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path what will take us to the stars - unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first.

[...] I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Do you believe in UFOs?’ I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?

In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, ‘facts’. We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts.