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.

Science is the only religion of mankind.

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

You can't have it both ways. You can't have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

Now times had changed, and the inherited wisdom of the past had become folly.