“The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.”

We are all stardust.

Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

Writing is the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

The brains -the thinking organs- are the world producers -nature’s genitals.

I was an ambitious child and I tended to be scatterbrained. If I was at school and saw a bird outside the window I wanted to follow it. I was adventurous.

Remember the mind is your best muscle, BIG ARMS can move rocks, but BIG WORDS can move mountains. Ride the brain train for success.

Working out is incredibly boring. I swear it’s true that the bigger your muscles get, the fewer brain cells you have.

Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain… you hear them and they’re affixed to you.

Unlike any other nation, here the people rule, and their will is the supreme law. It is sometimes sneeringly said by those who do not like free government, that here we count heads. True, heads are counted, but brains also.

My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew’s and Albert Einstein’s.

The first virtue of a young man today – that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers – is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.