I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.

Why do people in this age think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe?

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

Will none wipe the sneer off the face of the cosmos?

The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

The single definition of government I've ever seen that makes sense is that it's the organization which claims the right to kill people who won't do what it wants.

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.