And I think he actually believes the best way to do it is to gain a dictatorship over the Solar System. That ambition rules everything in his life. I… - Clifford D. Simak

They would fail. We would always fail. We weren’t built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn’t change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we traveled…

Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the failures and the empty triumphs.

The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.