“Respect people with less power then you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room,”

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just THIS?

Take them out onto the verandah and beat them with a cricket bat…. Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privilege.

Science is not a body of knowledge or a belief system, it is just a term that describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation.

It is just a term which describes humankind’s incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome.

Love without evidence is stalking.

It’s the fine balance of caffeine and alcohol that bookends my days

There is great wisdom in this… but I would add that opinions differ significantly from arse-holes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

The existence of a higher power with any consciousness or interest in the human race or ability to punish or reward humans for their moral choices or that there is any reason other than fear to believe in any version of an afterlife, I will give you my piano, one of my legs and my wife.

If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors.

Empathy is intuitive, but it is also something you can work on intellectually.

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world?

Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.

There are children in Africa, starving to death, and you don’t hear them whinging.

Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed.

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

Define yourself by what you love.

But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.

But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition… Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.

I consider myself a progressive. I have a passion for people who work. To me, this is about forward looking versus backward looking. Ideological gradations are the wrong way to look at it.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class.

Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.