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

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.

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.

Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie – or the gods, for that matter…Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness that can see naught above or beyond itself…the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Erlking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.

He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.

We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?