Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.

Sometimes when I'm in a bookstore or library, I am overwhelmed by all the things that I do not know. Then I am seized by a powerful desire to read all the books, one by one.

No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.

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.

Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.

Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.