But I am a Skeptic and I am professionally unattuned to believing in surfaces. - Isaac Asimov

The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals.

to an ant, an anteater is a higher order of creation. He would be too big for them to comprehend, too mighty to dream of resisting. He would move among them like an unseen, inexplicable whirlwind, visiting them with destruction and death. But that wouldn't spoil things for the ants. They would reason that destruction was simply their just punishment for evil. And the anteater wouldn't even know he was a deity. Or care.

I tell you. I want to go back to Helicon and take up a study of the mathematics of turbulence, which was my Ph.D. problem, and forget I ever saw — or thought I saw — that turbulence gave an insight into human society.