Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.

Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe there is a reason.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.