Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all.

The people are immensely likable— cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian. The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn't get much better than this.

Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.