“It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, ...”

“They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.”

“There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.”

“Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to conquer Earth, to steal their precious physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of competitionas if a species capable of making the jou...”

“And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious...”

“We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater goodfor putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. Its called moral vanity.”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”

“We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arri...”

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”