This poignant quote from Stephen Hawking sums up his life

Stephen Hawking was many things. He was a famous cosmologist and an activist who changed the world's perception of what a scientist could be. 
Perhaps more than anything else, Hawking, who died on Wednesday at the age of 76, saw us for exactly what we, as humans, really are.
"We are just a slightly advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet orbiting an average star," Hawking told Der Spiegel in 1988. "But we can understand the universe, and that makes us something very special."
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