"He is internationally famous in his own country."
"There is no science in Nature and there is no nature in Science." (modeled after an old joke about two main Soviet Union newspapers: "There is no pravda (truth) in Izvestia and there no izvestia (news) in Pravda.") (2013)
"Why do we need astronomy, you ask? To keep astronomers off the streets. Especially Wall Street." (OSU astronomy holiday party)
"If you don't keep it simple, it will become complicated." (advice to graduate students)
"Now we can conclusively say there is a better chance you will get shot in the face by Dick Cheney than Earth getting hit with a gamma-ray burst." (2006)
"Many scientists confuse 'difficult' with 'interesting'." (based on Bohdan Paczynski)
"Anybody can turn gold into gold. However, to turn gold into lead requires a special talent." (advice to prospective graduate students)
"Copernicus was also a medical doctor. Back then, a medical doctor would, in most cases, just bleed you. But since then, just like in astronomy, we have made a huge progress in medicine as well: now the health insurance bleeds you instead." (from a talk about "Copernican Revolution")
"Astronomy is an endurance sport." (advice to graduate students)
"Life of a graduate student is fraught with pitfalls. And some graduate students manage to fall into every single one of them."
"The gravitational lensing by a neutron star is so strong that a neutron star can see its own ass." (said at OSU astro-coffee)
"Science is a process." (often said at OSU astro-coffee, hardly original)
"You can discover that 70% of the Universe was missing only twice."
"My Top 10 list is so competitive that it only has eight people on it." (said during graduate admissions)
"As they say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But when it comes to dealing with computers, there is a button for doing exactly that."
"You can only be young once. But you can always be immature." (Dave Berry)
"Galaxies are like people. They are only normal until you get to know them." (Sandy Faber? Virginia Trimble?)
"Preprints: You can either read them or you can write them." (Penny Sackett)
"If you've seen one gamma-ray burst, you've seen one gamma-ray burst!" (Chryssa Kouveliotou?)
"The definition of an incremental discovery is one propounded by someone else's graduate student." (jvonkorff, December 2011, NYT comments)
"You can observe a lot just by watching." (Yogi Berra)
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." (Yogi Berra)
"He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." (Groucho Marx).
"It is better to be rich and healthy than to be sick and poor." (Anonymous)
"I am so busy these days that I don't even have time to delegate." (Anonymous, or rather did not want to be named)
December 2011