“We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.”

My goal is not to shove information into your head. It’s to find ways to reignite the curiosity that we all had as children for the natural world. You don’t have to tell a child to explore the backyard.

Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.

God displayed a sense of humor when he configured the region between our legs an entertainment complex built around a sewage system.

If we have the power to turn another planet into Earth, then we have the power to turn Earth back into Earth.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that’s because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

I love being wrong because that means in that instant, I learned something new that day.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

When we try to look farther into the universe we come to what appears to be the end of space but actually it’s the beginning of time.

Knowledge of the natural world and how it works should be counted as fundamental to informed governance. You can’t have a functioning democracy, if the electorate is under-informed or, worse, mis-informed.

There’s a saying in the scientific community, that every great truth goes through three phases. First, people deny it. Second, they say that it conflicts with the Bible. Third, they say that they’ve known it all along.

To be scientifically literate is to empower yourself to know when someone else is full of bullshit.

It’s better to understand something than to memorize something.

I wonder if, in fact, we have been observed by aliens and upon close examination of human conduct and human behavior they have concluded that there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

I think the best thing a parent can do, when raising a child, is simply get out of their way.

Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.

I’ve been writing since I was maybe seven.

I am all about new beginnings. A new grandchild, another new hairstyle, a new email account. Why not a new relationship with the press?

I tried to allow my children to take risks, to test themselves. Better broken bones than broken spirit.

Yes I do like children, Girl children, about eighteen or twenty.

I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.

I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that.

I have always been the kid who’s asked ‘Why?’ In my faith, you’re just supposed to have faith. But I was always like, why?