“We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems.”

Humor is everywhere in that there’s irony in just about anything a human does.

But as the cerebellum degrades with age, so does the quality of memories. The memories are there, but they’re not as good.

The world’s going to change climatically. We just want to control the change. We want to have a high quality of life for billions of people as we pass through this era.

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

I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem.

NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world’s premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget.

Without an end to the burning of fossil fuels, coal especially, most of us will live shorter lives. I’m hopeful, but very, very concerned.

Tax dollars intended for science education must not be used to teach creationism as any sort of real explanation of nature, because any observation or process of inference about our origin and the nature of the universe disproves creationism in every respect.

My father was a very good Boy Scout. He was very skilled with knots, and he showed me how to tie a bow tie.

If you just take a single human and put him or her in the forest he or she might not do very well without some sort of education which he got or she got from some tribe.

When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It’s like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?

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

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.

You run your life according to all this stuff that’s happened to you. All of your memories affect everything you do whereas with a computer, there’s adaptive software and things, but it’s more literal.

Every literate woman is a victory over poverty

The literati in their cellarsPerform semantic tarantellas.I wish I did it half as well as them.

In the South, it is different, they have a audience that is literate.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.