When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.

As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.

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.

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

To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea.

In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. [...] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.