Any ape can reach for a banana, but only a human can reach for the stars or even know what that means. - Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Whether a country is to be called 'civilised' or not, depends not on how affluent the upper 10 per cent are, but how well they treat the lower 10 per cent.

Here is this mass of jelly - three pound mass of jelly - that you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity.

Your "conscious life" is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.