Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.

There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.

To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

Surely no child, and few adults, have ever watched a bird in flight without envy.

However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at their scientific and philosophical points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had. It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for - of even against - evolution, march in the army of the night, their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.

We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth-if such a thing can even be said to exist.