Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.

Any path to knowledge is a path to God-or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

Don't mess up the environment until you're quite sure what you're doing.

The one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.