Cyberspace is - or can be - a good, friendly and egalitarian place to meet.

Well the hours are good...' ... 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die." His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this--"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific loquacity, wordless.

Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.

It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears.

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