“The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

“We are not the stuff that abides, but patternsthat perpetuate themselves.”

“Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.”

“Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the...”

“The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.”

“Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.”

“The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?""Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!""I guess that explains their rich milita...”

“Casting a curious gaze down on planet Earth, extra-terrestrial beings could well be forgiven for assuming that we humans are programmed in every move we make, by a palm-sized, oblong, slab of glass...”

“It was certainly true that I had no sense of humour in that I found nothing funny. I didnt know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific ...”

“God can use the jawbone of an ass!”

“Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. ...”