“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.”

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.

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.

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end.

The campaign against the death penalty has been – while a powerful campaign, its participants have been those who attend all of the vigils, a relatively small number of people.

I’d like to be remembered for being a good, kind, loving, gentle man who attempted to live wisely, and who cared a lot.

We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.

There are many things that seem impossible only so long as one does not attempt them.

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.

Many people today attempt to draw differences between communism and socialism – there are none.