“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.”

Never change a winning game; always change a losing one.

Always remember, believe in today, believe in tomorrow, believe in yourself, and whatever happens, don’t jump.

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

The Earth is not 6,000 or 10,000 years old. It’s not. And if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs.

Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It’s not that we need more food. It’s that we need to manage our food system better.

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.

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.’