The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.

In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer. [dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]

I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’!

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.

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

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.

I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.