A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic..

If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense ….

The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth..

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea,….

What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. I….

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion ….

The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppresse….

Not all bits have equal value..

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse.

It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in pow….

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. A….

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

There is a lurking fear that some things are not “meant" to be known, that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make..

The Hindu religion is the only of the World's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, num….

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five..

In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours..

In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that,….

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma res….

The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning..

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions..

In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled w….