Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

Some things have eternal value, and compassion is one of them. I hope we never lose that. Compassion for humans as well as animals.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

The West needs to relearn what the rest of the world has never forgotten - that there is nothing sinful in leisure as long as it does not degenerate into mere sloth.

No one of intelligence resents the inevitable.

Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.

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