Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Don't be a puppet of work

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

Truth comes when your mind and heart are purged of all sense of striving and you are no longer trying to become somebody; it is there when the mind is very quiet, listening timelessly to everything.

I've found the thing in life that I adore, which is working in science television. It's just a big adventure, really.

The human body is the only machine for which there are no spare parts.

Everyone can be awesome if they want it bad enough. And I don't believe that anyone wants to be average. I think everybody desires greatness, at least at some point in their life.

It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer.

I was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My mother lost most of her family, and I didn't realize how much the guilt of survivorship weighed on her until I was an adult.

It is hard to grow up in a society in which one's important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it.

Good is not always God's will, but God's will is always good.