Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say ‘Heil Hitler.’

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn't get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total darkness half of every day. There wouldn't be any native inhabitants. You couldn't expect life - which is fundamentally dependent on light - to develop under such extreme conditions of light deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that.

God, how that stings! I've spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that's just science fiction.

No one can possibly have lived through the Great Depression without being scarred by it. No amount of experience since the depression can convince someone who has lived through it that the world is safe economically.

The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.