Top 50 Brian Cox Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.”

— Brian Cox

Featured in: Science Quotes

2. “When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins, because we are truly children of the stars.”

— Brian Cox

Featured in: Universe Quotes, Space Quotes

3. “Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.”

— Brian Cox

4. “The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!”

— Brian Cox

5. “When you fall into a black hole you will be literally spaghettified.”

— Brian Cox

6. “Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing – wonder.”

— Brian Cox

7. “Climate change: Don’t undermine the science just because you don’t like the economics.”

— Brian Cox

8. “In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false.”

— Brian Cox

9. “Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on.”

— Brian Cox

10. “For the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space.”

— Brian Cox

11. “Science is about exploring, and the only way to uncover the secrets of the universe is to go and look.”

— Brian Cox

12. “Science is too important not to be a part of popular culture.”

— Brian Cox

13. “The aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. By everything I mean me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.”

— Brian Cox

14. “We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets.”

— Brian Cox

15. “If people don’t have an understanding of what science is and what scientists do, then they can tend to think that global warming, for example, is just a matter of opinion.”

— Brian Cox

16. “One might say science is the sum total of our knowledge of the universe, the great library of the known, but the practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.”

— Brian Cox

17. “Look at that! If you ever needed convincing that we live in the solar system, that we are on a ball of rock, orbiting around the Sun with other balls of rock, then look at that! That’s the solar system coming down and grabbing you by the throat.”

— Brian Cox

18. “As we get older, things seem less important.”

— Brian Cox

19. “No one gets teased for being a geek anymore- science is the new rock n roll.”

— Brian Cox

20. “There is so much left of it to explore.”

— Brian Cox

21. “Don’t undermine the science just because you don’t like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society.”

— Brian Cox

22. “An explorer of the universe is sexier than a musician.”

— Brian Cox

23. “What scientists are attached to is journeys into the unknown and discovering things that are completely unexpected and baffling and surprising.”

— Brian Cox

24. “At every stage of understanding the universe better, the benefits to civilisation have been immeasurable. None of those big leaps were made with us knowing what was going to happen.”

— Brian Cox

25. “Life, just like the stars, the planets and the galaxies, is just a temporary structure on the long road from order to disorder. But that doesn’t make us insignificant, because we are the Cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And for me, our true significance lies in our ability to understand and explore this beautiful universe.”

— Brian Cox

26. “We have written the evidence of our existence onto the surface of our planet. Our civilisation has become a beacon, that identifies our planet as home to life.”

— Brian Cox

27. “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is one of the most misunderstood parts of quantum theory, a doorway through which all sorts of charlatans and purveyors of tripe8 can force their philosophical musings.”

— Brian Cox

28. “Thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams exist on Earth because of electrical activity inside a 1.5-kilogram blob of stuff, which hasn’t changed much since the earliest modern humans began the long journey out of Africa.”

— Brian Cox

29. “You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime.”

— Brian Cox

30. “It would be wonderful if ideas could be the new rock ’n roll.”

— Brian Cox

31. “The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”

— Brian Cox

32. “So if we assume we are not the only civilisation in the galaxy, then at least a few others must have arisen billions of years ahead of us. But where are they?”

— Brian Cox

33. “Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil’.”

— Brian Cox

34. “Common sense is completely worthless and irrelevant when trying to understand reality. This is probably why people who like to boast about their common sense tend to rail against the fact that they share a common ancestor with a monkey.”

— Brian Cox

35. “For me, Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’ defines New York. Both New York and Manhattan Island should be in black in white! I always hear the soundtrack of Gershwin in my head every time I go over the Queensboro Bridge, or come in from JFK because of it!”

— Brian Cox

36. “They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you’ll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.”

— Brian Cox

37. “The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.”

— Brian Cox

38. “I believe powerfully that we who have the power should strive to extend the gift of education to everyone. Education is the most important investment a developed society can make, and the most effective way of nurturing a developing one.”

— Brian Cox

39. “Things inexorably get worse.”

— Brian Cox

40. “The practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.”

— Brian Cox

41. “We’re both clever and stupid in equal measure.”

— Brian Cox

42. “United States spends more on pet grooming than it does on fusion research.”

— Brian Cox

43. “The trick as an educated citizen of the twenty-first century is to realise that Nature is far stranger and more wonderful than human imagination, and the only appropriate response to new discoveries is to enjoy one’s inevitable discomfort, take delight in being shown to be wrong and learn something as a result.”

— Brian Cox

44. “I deliberately borrow from Shakespeare; the most precious objects on Earth are not gems or jewels, but ink marks on paper. No single human brain could conceive of Hamlet, Principia Mathematica or Codex Leicester; they were created by and belong to the entire human race, and the library of wonders continues to grow.”

— Brian Cox

45. “One of the great joys of science is to understand something for the first time–to really understand, which is very different from, and far more satisfying than, knowing the facts.”

— Brian Cox

46. “The current worldview is never claimed to be correct, in the very important sense that there are no absolute truths in science. The body of scientific knowledge at any point in history, including now, is simply the collection of theories and views of the world that have not yet been shown to be wrong.”

— Brian Cox

47. “In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.”

— Brian Cox

48. “Science is most definitely not a priesthood where people stand on a mountain and pass truths down to the waiting minions below.”

— Brian Cox

49. “To me, and to the participants of at the Green Bank conference, the idea that a civilization might destroy itself is both ludicrous and likely. We are pathetically inadequate at long-term planning, idiotically primitive in our destructive urges and pathologically incapable of simply getting along.”

— Brian Cox

50. “Science is delighted frustration. It is about asking questions, to which the answers may be unavailable – now, or perhaps ever. It is about noticing regularities, asserting that these regularities must have natural explanations and searching for those explanations.”

— Brian Cox