Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism... for testing your thoughts against the universe.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern.

That's the harm of Close Encounters: that it convinces tens of millions that that's what just science fiction is.

Since emotions are few and reasons are many (said the robot Giscard) the behavior of a crowd can be more easily predicted than the behavior of one person.

If I am right, then (religious fundamentalists) will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.