If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.

If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting

The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price – and who can tell what that price may be? – in toil, suffering and blood.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

As the journalists of the time phased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania; everyone of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of the road, and in France in the year 1943 thirty thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared humming softly into the sky.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing.