As soon as I learned from my mother that there was a place called school that I must attend willy nilly – a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a ‘teacher,’ not about matters decided by yourself – I was appalled.

It isn’t the Universe that’s following our logic, it’s we that are constructed in accordance with the logic of the Universe. And that gives what I might call a definition of intelligent life: something that reflects the basic structure of the Universe.

When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I’m old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.

There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don’t know what it’s a plan for.

I don’t see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.

Outstanding examples of genius – a Mozart, a Shakespeare, or a Carl Friedrich Gauss – are markers on the path along which our species appears destined to tread.

Hoyle’s enduring insights into stars, nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale universe rank among the greatest achievements of 20th-century astrophysics. Moreover, his theories were unfailingly stimulating, even when they proved transient.

Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down.

Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000).... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.