The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
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Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
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There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
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CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
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It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.
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As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
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A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
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Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: (1) It's completely impossible. (2) It's possible, but it's not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God--but to create him.
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The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
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Reading computer manuals without the hardware is a frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
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We are just tenants on this world. We have just been given a new lease, and a warning from the landlord.
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The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
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At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
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If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
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If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
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It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God-but to create him.
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It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come when men control the destinies of stars.
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Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now.
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It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
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Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.
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Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
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But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
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The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
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Los Angeles seems endlessly held between these extremes: of light and dark - of surface and depth. Of the promise, in brief, of a meaning always hovering on the edge of significance.
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I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.
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All the strength and force of man comes from his faith in things unseen. He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions.
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A politician thinks of the next election a statesman of the next generation.
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We are either progressing or retrograding all the while. There is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life.
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