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

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.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

It’s not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.

Edinburgh is an experience A city of enormous gifts Whose streets sing of history Whose cobbles tell tales.

Yet deregulation set the stage for an enormous wave of creative destruction in the 1980s.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

There have been enormous advances since 9/11 to build a very robust set of targeting procedures and watch lists to screen travelers coming to the United States.

The potential of Mexico, Canada and the United States is enormous.

For many years my acting came from a place of surmounting some enormous obstacle.

The enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self-devoted are absolutely ineffective.