"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?"
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
"We are star stuff harvesting sunlight."
"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."
"I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves."
"In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds."