I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do.