“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.”

If you want to assert a truth, first make sure it’s not just an opinion that you desperately want to be true.

Part of knowing how to think is knowing how the laws of nature shape the world around us. Without that knowledge, without that capacity to think, you can easily become a victim of people who seek to take advantage of you.

The greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.

The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

I object to religion in science classrooms not because it’s religion but because it’s not science.

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

There is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

If factual information upsets you, then you are creating a world that is not embracing objective truths, and that’s not how you advance a democracy.

If each dead person became a ghost, there’d be more than 100 billion of them haunting us all. Creepy, but cool.

Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.

My goal is not to shove information into your head. It’s to find ways to reignite the curiosity that we all had as children for the natural world. You don’t have to tell a child to explore the backyard.

Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.

God displayed a sense of humor when he configured the region between our legs an entertainment complex built around a sewage system.

If we have the power to turn another planet into Earth, then we have the power to turn Earth back into Earth.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that’s because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

I have begun everything with the idea that I could succeed, and I never had much patience with the multitudes of people who are always ready to explain why one cannot succeed.

If everybody trusts one another, then the person who didn’t prevail will faithfully execute the decision as if it was their idea.

Life is very, very simple and easy to understand, but we complicate it with the beliefs and ideas that we create.

Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.

Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance. Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth.

All my life I have had a certain idea of France.

I think we brought to the world, the United States anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change.

The idea is not to live forever, it is to create something that will.