In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program.

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.

Colonization means potential immortality for the human genus. Man's safety on Earth was never great, and it dwindles hourly. Disarmament, even world government, will not guarantee survival in an age when population presses natural resources to the limit and when the knowledge of how to work mischief on a planetary scale is ever more widely diffused among peoples who may grow ever more desperate.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

So much American science fiction is parochial - not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way.