He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand.

You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.

The intelligent minority of this world will mark 1 January 2001 as the real beginning of the 21st century and the Third Millennium.

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.

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

There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.

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