Explore Quotes by Brian Cox

The trouble with New York today is that it's lost its balance. I love the new, greener New York, but it takes all kinds of worlds to make a World.

I come from a working class community in eastern Scotland, and I've always been a populist, though not a patronising populist.

Even the Australians don't know how beautiful their own country is. Particularly where we were shooting 'The Straits.' Most of my stuff was done on an aboriginal settlement on the south shore, opposite Cairns, which I believe was the site where the last person was eaten in Australia.

As a boy, I was never interested in theater because I came from a working-class Scottish home. I thought, 'I want to do movies.' Then it was finding the means to do it.

I was living in London and I thought, 'There's nothing here for me anymore.' I don't want to become this actor who's going to be doing this occasional good work in the theater and then ever diminishing bad television. I thought I'd rather do bad movies than bad television because you get more money for it.

For me, it's just acting. It's pretending. The best actors are children, and children don't do research. You never see a child going, 'I'm wondering about my motivation here. How can I do this toy? How can I do this train? I don't feel train.'

People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.

My mother Molly had a nervous breakdown after my father Chic died, aged 50. He was a very generous man who ran a shop in Dundee giving a lot of people tick. When he died, a lot of people hadn't paid their bills, so he died with a lot of debt. After he died, my mother went doolally.

There's so much light in Broughty Ferry. I think the humour in Glasgow is darker, because it's much more gloomy, there's a perpetual misery there.

The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!

Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.

Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.

(On the energy radiated by the Sun) It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.

You dig deeper and it gets more and more complicated, and you get confused, and it's tricky and it's hard, but... It is beautiful.

We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.

We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.