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.

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

I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favourite of the Sun's children.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.