The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

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

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible-indeed, inevitable-the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment, the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion.... Climbing at millions of miles per hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space.

If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs-those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures-then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean- 'spaceship.'

Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological

The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers - and thermonuclear weapons.