Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?

Moses Kaldor had always loved mountains; they made him feel nearer to the God whose nonexistence he still sometimes resented.

... chemistry is a trade for people without enough imagination to be physicists.

We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term.