“If your belief system is not founded in an objective reality, you should not be making decisions that affect other people.”

No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don’t ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives.

Aliens might be surprised to learn that in a cosmos with limitless starlight, humans kill for energy sources buried in the sand.

I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.

As they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion… Although just as in hostage negotiations, it’s probably best to keep both sides talking to each other.

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.

Our nation is turning into an idiocracy.

Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

If you need to invoke your academic pedigree or job title for people to believe what you say, then you need a better argument.

The day that you stop looking – because you’re content God did it – I don’t need you in the lab. You’re useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.

As areas of knowledge grow, so too do the perimeters of ignorance.

Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what’s really there.

Somehow it’s O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, ‘I never learned to read,’ they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.

Curiously, light-loving green plants reject the Sun’s green light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look green.

Claiming there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up some water, looking at the cup and claiming there are no whales in the ocean.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others. It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

Though how nature works is way beyond man’s ability to comprehend, I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us.

Poverty disproportionately affects women around the world.

Even an idle phone conversation when driving takes a 40 percent bite out of your focus and, surprisingly, can have the same effect as being drunk.

If you don’t have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won’t change the trajectory for students.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

Looks like what drives me crazy Don’t have no effect on you– But I’m gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.

The Congress is virtually incapable of passing any reforms unless they first get permission from the powerful special interests who are most affected by the proposal.

So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, Angels affect us often.