If you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt–preferably dirt that is locally sourced.

In a battery, I strive to maximize electrical potential. When mentoring, I strive to maximize human potential.

Want to know the best thing about being a professor? Colored chalk.

With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal and gas and nuclear do today.

How do we attack important problems? Pose the right question.

People would like better batteries but they are wary of making investments. What is required is both a technology push and a market pull.

The liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology. It's a blueprint for inventing inventors.

The students who work with me believe in science in service of society, not science in service of career building.

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.

I would treat her like an egg, the shell of which we remove before eating it; I would take off her mask and then kiss her pretty face.

Life is easy when you're hot. But what happens when the ball bounces the other way? You just keep getting back up and climbing up.

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

If everyone who wants to see an end to poverty, hunger and suffering speaks out, then the noise will be deafening.

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

My first cat was named Cowboy, after the Dallas Cowboys.

As soon as I get on my boat, something inside me changes. Then I really feel what living is.

Our most merciless enemy is our past.

You don't need to be talented. You don't even have to play the guitar to be a guitar player in a punk-rock band. So I, in a very naïve and teenage way, said, "That's it. I'm going to be in a band."