In life, people will take you at your own reckoning.

I figure that if God actually does exist, he is big enough to understand an honest difference of opinion.

One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.

In the presence of total Darkness, the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light.

It has always been my ambition to die in harness with my head face down on a keyboard and my nose caught between two of the keys.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer - by demonstration - would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done. And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And there was light...

One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.