We always thought the living Earth was a thing of beauty. It isn’t. Life has had to learn to defend itself against the planet’s random geological savagery.

I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.

If I didn't exist, I would have invented myself.

But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.

If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.