The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.

The choice, as Wells once said, is the Universe-or nothing. . . . The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still untrodden heights and will be descending again the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down to the shores of the primeval sea.

Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.

One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.

That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.