The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.

"Right!" "Right!" "You can get there!" "I can get there!" "You're a natural at counting to two!" "I'm a nat'ral at counting to two!" "If you can count to two, you can count to anything!" "If I can count to two, I can count to anything!" "And then the world is your mollusc!" "My mollusc! What's a mollusc?

Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.

Even a really bad creator would at least have started with Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Surprise.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

That's why it's always worth having a few philosophers around the place. One minute it's all is truth beauty and is beauty truth, and does a falling tree in the forest make a sound if there's no one there to hear it, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.

I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.