"No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives."
"Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology."
"Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival."
"People who are scientists today are scientists in spite of the system, typically, not because of it."
"The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them."
"Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children."
"For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested."
"All tweets are tasty. Any tweet anybody writes is tasty. So, I try to have each tweet not simply be informative, but have some outlook, some perspective that you might not otherwise had."
"No one wants to die, and no one wants to die poor. These are the two fundamental truths that transcend culture, they transcend politics, they transcend economic cycles."
"The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought."
"We didn't go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we're Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat."
"When you innovate, you create new industries that then boost your economy. And when you create new industries and that becomes part of your culture, your jobs can't go overseas because no one else has figured out how to do it yet."
"Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space."
"All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA."
"As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space."
"Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct."
"Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans."
"There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk."
"There is no greater education than one that is self-driven."
"Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached."
"Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find."
"For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains."
"It turns out our brain is sensitive, maybe too sensitive, to motion. It's a survival mechanism."
"Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions."
"I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we're the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations."
