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.

Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you'd go crazy.

Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.

Any path to knowledge is a path to God-or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use

Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.