Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alley… - Stanisław Lem

The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.

...all perception is but a change in the concentration of hydrogen ions on the surface of the brain cells.

A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all.