Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.

[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.