The planet had been slowed down - but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System.

I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.

Üretim büyük ölçüde otomatikleşmişti. Robotların işlettiği fabrikalar ardı arkası kesilmeyen tüketim malları üretiyordu; böylece yaşam için gereken her şey neredeyse bedava olmuştu. İnsanlar artık istedikleri lükslere sahip olabilmek için çalışıyordu. Ya da hiç çalışmıyordu.

All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun.

The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.

Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.

Slowly, Jimmy held up his outstretched hands. Men had been arguing for two hundred years about this gesture; would every creature, everywhere in the universe, interpret this as "See--no weapons"? But no one could think of anything better.

Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.