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 essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.

The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept, so do the timid, so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.

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

Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.