Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.

There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it.

Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.