What else is life but always bidding farewell? - Poul Anderson

What I want is to commune with the land. In company I couldn’t admit that. It’d sound too pompous, as though I were from Greenpeace or the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

I am a peaceful man, captain. I rely more on my cerebral cortex than my guns.

There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.