I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

The best proof of intelligent life in space is that it hasn't come here.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

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.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.