The extraordinary meeting of the Space Advisory Council was brief and stormy. Even by the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.

The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.

I think academia is just still very conservative in the way that people are hired and promoted.

...I cannot conceive that a day will come when science will be complete and achieved. There will always be new problems, and exactly at the same pace as science is able to solve problems which were deemed philosophical a dozen years or a century ago, so there will appear new problems which had not hitherto been not perceived as such.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more

I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Science in the twenty-first century does not encourage scientists to take risks in their pursuit of "the facts"—particularly when those facts call into question long-established notions.

A change in administration doesn’t automatically fix the underlying problems, which include the corporate media’s marginalizing of science, ongoing divides over science and religion, and an American culture that all too often questions the value of intellect and even glorifies dumbness.

The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.

A theory of power has long been the Holy Grail for political science, but the Grail has not been found.

There was no simple riddance to the power of a dangerous political idea; no assassination possible to avert a disruptive change in technology; no natural death to be counted on to stop an economic change that ripped up ancestral estates or stirred up class discontent.

Serious thinkers pointed out that humankind was scarcely ready to colonize the stars, having solved none of its problems at home.