Ask courageous questions.
Do not be satisfied with superficial answers.
Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to intense skeptical scrutiny.
Be aware of human fallibility.
Cherish your species and your planet.
The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal
It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another. We must all help one another or all perish together.
If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
Science is a collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations. When it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way - seeing for them also.
There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.
Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.
In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields-mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters.
Eratosthenes was the director of the great library of Alexandria, the Centre of science and learning in the ancient world. Aristotle had argued that humanity was divided into Greeks and everybody else, whom he called barbarians and that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. He thought it was fitting for the Greeks to enslave other peoples. But Erathosthenes criticized Aristotle for his blind chauvinism, he believed there was good and bad in every nation.