"You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues."
— Richard Dawkins

"Science is a way of thinking much more then it is a body of knowledge."
— Carl Sagan

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."
— Milton Friedman

"Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh."
— W.H. Auden

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
— Nelson Mandela

"The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don’t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He’ll use his word, and if I understand it, I’ll say, “Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?""
— Neil deGrasse Tyson

"It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."
— Michio Kaku (Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension)

"We are all born with a powerful herd instinct and it can force otherwise rational people to act in inexplicable ways."
— Paul Rusesabagina

"This is why I say that the individual's most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency."
— Paul Rusesabagina (An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography)

"My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me. "
— Oliver W. Sacks

""God is dead," Nick said. "They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha."

"They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are," Charley said. "And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.""
— Philip K. Dick (Our Friends from Frolix 8)

"How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation."
— Douglas R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid)

"Like most visions of a 'golden age', the 'traditional family' evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place."
— Stephanie Coontz (The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap)

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... "
— William Gibson (Neuromancer)

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
— William Gibson