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

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

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

Before the current decade ends, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing suborbital flights aboard privately funded vehicles. . . . It won't be too long before bright young men and women set their eyes on careers in Earth orbit and say: "I want to work 200 kilometers from home-straight up!"

The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

Civilization will reach maturity only when it learns to value diversity of character and of ideas.