Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.

Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along.

When all else failed, you had to rely on eyeball intrumentation.

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

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.

The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.