Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way

I believe in no final solutions.

And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.

Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him.

Is a mountain only a huge stone? Is a planet an enormous mountain?