I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

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.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

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.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

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

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

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.

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.

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

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

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.

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

Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are as sand, as dust - or less than dust - in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing.

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

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.

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

As soon as I started working at the 'Los Angeles Times,' people warned me not to get too close to artists because it could make it difficult to review their work, and you can never really tell if the 'friendship' is genuine.

To many, Courtney Love smells like rock hype. Reviewers may be excited about her, but the rock audience may be skeptical of the credentials of someone who is more famous for her interviews and her spouse than for her music.

Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Sex Pistols may come and go, but rebellion remains a key part of the rock n' roll experience. However, that rebellion - the outgrowth of a youthful search for independence and identity - doesn't always take the same form.

Write about your experiences! When I moved to L.A., I didn't have any friends, and the office janitor was the person who I saw the most. He would always come in at around 10:00 P.M., and I would still be at my desk, so I wrote a play about a first-year TV writer and the friendship that she developed with the janitor. Our stories matter.

I'm sad about my theatre career, but I've also fallen a bit in love with TV!

When I got to Scotland, I signed up on a site called Meetup. It's like these group things you can do - a poetry reading, a hike, whatever.

I'm interested in people's darkness - and humor in the darkness.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

The future is like heaven, everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.