“Wells is teaching us to think. Burroughs and his lesser imitators are teaching us not to think. Of course, Burroughs is teaching us to wonder. The sense of wonder is in essence a religious state, b...”

“We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions t...”

“An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.”

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

“The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest...”

“Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.”

“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.”