“All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science.”

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.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.

The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.

The Obama-Clinton economy has done enormous damage to the Hispanic community.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

The sudden release of five million barrels of oil, enormous quantities of methane and two million gallons of toxic dispersants into an already greatly stressed Gulf of Mexico will permanently alter the nature of the area.

Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

There wouldn’t have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.