The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you. - Dr. Hoenikker's Nobel Prize acceptance speech (in its entirety); chapter 5

And, if you'll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you'll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.- Said by Dr. Asa Breed; chapter 15

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.