Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology.

People think the earth is going to die and they have to save it. That's ridiculous. If you rid the earth of flowering plants, people would die, period. But the earth was without flowering plants for almost all of its history.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

I thought I was going to be killed. The casualties were so heavy, it was just a given. I learned to take each day, each mission, as it came. That's an attitude I've carried into my professional life. I take each case, each job, as it comes.

The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death.

Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough.

I don't have to go to church. The church is within me and the experience is my own. It's my life experience.