I'm quite fond of the writer who told a beginning author, "If you've got a message, use Western Union."

The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.

My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

The piece of equipment I'm most found off is my telescope. The other night I had a superb view of the moon.

Now I understand,” said the last man.

In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs.