There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

Stupid people do stupid things, but people who are smart enough can do something really stupid.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

Ecstasy hates company.

We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.