“Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.”

In another couple centuries I’m sure that worldview won’t even exist. There’s no evidence for it.

But investment in space stimulates society, it stimulates it economically, it stimulates it intellectually, and it gives us all passion.

From an evolutionary standpoint you can’t just wipe everything out and start over, and I don’t think you can do it in the school system either.

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we’re here. And that’s astonishing. And that we can understand that, that’s the most astonishing.

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun’s rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you’re left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

Teaching creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution is inappropriate.

I say to the grown-ups, ‘If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we’ve observed in the universe that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it.’

Hard to find anything lovelier than a tree. They grow at right angles to a tangent of the nominal sphere of the Earth.

I want mechanical engineers to make better transportation systems. I want chemical engineers to develop better solar panels, and so on.

You start doing the addictive behavior to feel good and then your receptors get overloaded with dopamine, then you stop doing the addictive thing and some of the receptors have shut down and you don’t have enough dopamine to feel good.

That’s what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.

Talk about science with everyone you meet. Especially talk about climate change. It needs to become a part of our everyday conversation (the way it is everywhere else in the world).

One of the drawbacks of English is you can’t spell things by hearing them.

I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that’s completely inconsistent with the world we observe, that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it. Because we need them.

There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as “we”; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm.

Likewise that it must be all the same to them that these adhere to such or such religion, so long as a full (or complete) liberty is equally garantee for everyone.

I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.

We have lived with violence far too long.

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.

Anything you ever make that matters takes a long time.

They say before you make something happen you have to see it yourself.

I have been seeing it for a long time and I am living my dream.