Science has always promised two things not necessarily related; an increase first in our powers, second in our happiness or wisdom, and we have come to realize that it is the first and less important of the two promises which it has kept most abundantly.

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.

An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.

In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.

The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.