After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, read more

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to read more

It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and read more

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and read more

I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.

the tragic or the humorous is a matter of perspective

the tragic or the humorous is a matter of perspective

Concentrate, play your game, and don't be afraid to win.

Concentrate, play your game, and don't be afraid to win.

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions read more

We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that read more

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.