"Conquest is all. having conquered land and sea, we are now conquering space, more and more of it. As soon as we have conquered the moon, we must make plans to conquer the planets. I am not denying that there is in all this a fine mixed element of enterprise, ingenuity and adventure. But the repeated use of these terms conquer and conquest is worth noting. It offers us a picture of modern humanity as a restless and ruthless immature male. He is restless and ruthless because the relation between the conqueror and the conquered is rarely satisfying. The conqueror has to push on because he soon finds his victories hollow and disappointing. Nature, nothing if not feminine, seems to take a sly pleasure in outwitting her conquerors."

“Because most children are highly imaginative, it is supposed by some that to reach maturity we ought to leave imagination behind, like the habit of smearing our faces with jam or chocolate. But an adult in whom imagination has withered is mentally lame and lopsided, in danger of turning into a zombie or a murderer. It is the creative imagination that has given our ruthless bloodthirsty species its occasional gleams of nobility, its hope of rising above the muck it spreads.”

“It's silly for young men to announce themselves as new types of humanity. . .and then give you nothing but stale communism. Old H.G. Wells has more new ideas than the lot of them.”

“I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.”

“I've been up and down and round about," said the Commodore, "and I've seen a lot of religions at work. And I don't like them. With all due respect, padre. As a matter of fact I'm not thinking about the Church of England, which is something different, something intended to keep the English decent and fairly comfortable and not likely to go tearing off into religion and making nuisances of themselves—”

“We cannot go forward and build up this new world order, and this is our war aim, unless we begin to think differently...one must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. Property is the old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things in that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property; instead of thinking of a country as the home of a living society with the community itself as the first test.”

“The appalling difficulty of examining the Time problem seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that Time either changes into something else or quietly disappears from the examination room. Trying to keep it fixedly in view is like playing Wonderland croquet.”