“The US Navy has several people on every ship that can navigate by the stars. They don’t fool with that.”

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

The strange thing about grinding that might surprise many people is that you can grind things and shape them using materials that are generally somewhat softer than the thing you’re grinding and shaping.

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change. All of these people breathing and burning our atmosphere has led to an extraordinarily dangerous situation.

It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself.

Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past.

People get a lot out of being religious. They have strong senses of community and mutual support. So, what’s not to love [there]?

Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that’s yet to be discovered. Here’s hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.

There’s nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That’s just crazy.

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he’s a human calculator. He says it’s a skill he learned as a kid. Now he’s a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

I abandoned my religious teachings after I read the Bible twice – cover to cover. It took me a couple of years.

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it’s game over. It’s control-alt-delete for civilization.

The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get to select which facts you like and which you don’t.

I tell personal stories associated with aspects of the theory, and I hope they are interesting and compelling. I don’t feel you’re going to change a grownup’s mind in one reading. People have to be exposed to scientific ideas over and over again for years. It’s also not a textbook.

Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym.

I did not have any money, so when I came to New York, I just dressed myself with whatever I could find and the Army-Navy store.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.

The Navy’s a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, ‘Frightfully sorry, old chap.’

I left Scotland when I was 16 because I had no qualifications for anything but the Navy, having left school at 13.

Navy in Lebanon, the guns of U.S. paratroopers in Grenada, and the guns of U.S. helicopters in Honduras and El Salvador.

It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.