“I believe that we need to slow down.”

That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.

It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.

Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.

I consider myself a spiritual atheist.

In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.