We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth, and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.

We don't know how to identify intelligence over interstellar distances, so what we do instead is use technology for a proxy.

Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath the Earth's crust, in pure salt crystals, and inside the rocks of the dry valleys of Antarctica.

Our television transmitters leak out from the Earth. And actually, there's a sphere surrounding the Earth from the earliest television signals, maybe 70 years ago, that's going out one light year per year. But it's really weak.

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.

American government did not originate in any abstract theories about liberty and equality, but in the actual experience gained by generation after generation of English colonists in managing their own political affairs. The Revolution did not make a breach in the continuity of their institutional life.