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" We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal's 'Pensees' and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.' "

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" When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it. "

" Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that. "

" Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. "

" I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star. "

" It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience. "

" It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. "

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

" The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. "

" We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being. "

" All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. "

" We start out a million years ago in a small community on some grassy plain; we hunt animals, have children, and develop a rich social, sexual, and intellectual life, but we know almost nothing about our surroundings. "

" The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before. "

" But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. "

" Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. "

" The professed function of the nuclear weapons on each side is to prevent the other side from using their nuclear weapons. If that's all it is, then we've gotta as: how many nuclear weapons do you need to do that? "

Nuclear Weapons

" Today, we're still loaded down - and, to some extent, embarrassed - by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed. "

" We're in very bad trouble if we don't understand the planet we're trying to save. "

" Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. "

" The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. "

" In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. "

" Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out. "

" No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception. "

" A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. "

" The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. "

" You probably don't need more weapons than what's required to destroy every city on earth. There's only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons - well, we've got more than 25,000! "

" The boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I'll probably always be interested in this planet - it's my favorite. "

" If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? "

" Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. "

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

" We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. "