Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence – or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly’s wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.
CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.
Now I can rejoice that I knew you, rather than mourn because I lost you.
He did not know that the Old One was his father, for such a relationship was utterly beyond his understanding, but as he looked at the emaciated body he felt a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness.
But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.
My dear Rikki,” Karellen retorted, “it’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess!” Despite himself, Stormgren smiled.
Problems seldom go away if they’re ignored.
Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.
Don’t believe anything I’ve told you – merely because I said it.
Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.
Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.
Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.
Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap.