"As an auxiliary to all of this," he said, "I have found myself speculating upon a world in which no one ever grew up. I admit, of course, that it is a rather acrobatic feat of thinking, not entirely consistent, to leap from the one idea to the other. In a world where one was able to package his experiences, he merely would be able to relive at some future time the experiences of the past. But in a world of the eternally young he'd have no need of such packaging. Each new day would bring the same freshness and the everlasting wonder inherent in the world of children. There would be no realization of death and no fear born of the knowledge of the future. Life would be eternal and there'd be no thought of change. One would exist in an everlasting matrix and while there would be little variation from one day to the next, one would not be aware of this and there'd be no boredom..."

“To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.”

“The party was beginning to get noisy—not boisterous, but noisy. It was beginning to acquire that stale air of futility to which, in the end, all parties must fall victim.”

“Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.”

“My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over. It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species. Further than this, there should be no economic necessity of its doing so. By the time it was able to go into deep space, it must have arrived at an energy source which would not be based on planetary natural resources.”

“It was not his fight. Not personally his fight. No more his fight than any one of them. But he had made it his. Because of Stone, because of Rand and Harriet, because of priest who’d hounded him across half the continent, he had tried to make a fight of it. And perhaps, as well, because of something undefinable, unknown to himself, unsuspected in himself—some crazy idealism, some deep-rooted sense of justice, some basic aversion to bullies and bigots and reformers.”

“It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.”