Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million; biology took away our status as paragons c… - Stephen Jay Gould

Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

I like to think of myself as a tough-minded intellectual, a foe of all fuzziness from alien abductions to past-life regressions. I hate to think that an intellectual position, hopefully well worked out in the pages of this book, might end up as a shill for one of the great fuzzinesses of our age—so-called “political correctness” as a doctrine that celebrates all indigenous practice, and therefore permits no distinctions, judgments, or analyses.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights—and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one <nowiki>[Oliver]</nowiki> Sacks, one <nowiki>[Eric]</nowiki> Korn, or one <nowiki>[Jonathan]</nowiki> Miller, usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well—magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?