“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.”

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. The key to our being here now is time, 4.54 billion (Earth) years of time.

I meet so many people who are intimidated by arithmetic.

I hope climate science becomes the big thing. And then what I want is electrical engineers to solve the world’s energy problems, energy distribution problems.

If you decide to become a dancer on Broadway, never say who your favorite dance partner is, because members of the media will presume you never want to dance with anybody else.

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.

The faster I make a lot of money, the faster I can have these kids I want.

I sit and talk to kids all day, because I feel like they carry the most wisdom.

People are used to music that justifies street culture but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live.

Adults are only kids grown up.

I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.

I don”t know if I like communism, and I don”t know if I like socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for Children Program feeds my kids. And if you put your hands on that Breakfast for Children Program.

I wasn’t a comic book geek as a kid. I read some, but it was just like, ‘Oh, I have this comic book here.’ It wasn’t like I was collecting them.

I’m serious when I do my work. I’m not serious when I’m home with my kids.