Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.