Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one a… - Clifford D. Simak

It must be wonderful, I thought, to be, not exactly rich, but to have enough so you didn’t have to worry when there was some little thing you wanted, not to have to wonder if it would be all right if you spent the money for it. To be able to live in a house like this, to line the walls with books and have rich draperies and to have more than just one bottle of booze and a place to keep it other than a kitchen shelf.

The past, he said. The past is too much with me. And the past has made me useless. I have too much to remember—so much to remember that it becomes more important than the things there are to do. I’m living in the past and that is no way to live.

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.