A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it consciousness because it's a species we dislike.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

Shine as light in the darkness of every human sphere of life

Trust means everything. But when it is broken, sorry mean nothing.

Read what you like, not what you’re told to like. That way you’ll read for a lifetime.

Compassion should be unbiased and based on the recognition that others have the right to happiness, just like you.

My one light American Spirit that I smoke once a week, on Saturday night.

There's something that sort of weirds me out about actors who want to be rock stars, and the other way around too.

We rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things.

If Boris [Johnson] backtracks on serious things there'll be another bloody revolt.

If you are sending someone some Styrofoam, what do you pack it in?