“There are no atheists in foxholes,” he remembered, but the whole world now was nothing but a huge foxhole! But certainly what had happened did not i… - George R. Stewart

The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later.

He had kept the university library as a reserve for the future. He had even taught the children to respect it. Yes, he had even, he was afraid, put a kind of taboo upon it. In fact, not only here but everywhere, he had always tried to impress the children with an almost mystical value of books. Still he kept the symbol of the burning of the books as one of the worst things that men could do.

In the times of civilization men had really felt themselves as the masters of creation. Everything has been good or bad in relation to man. So you killed rattlesnakes. But now nature had become so overwhelming that any attempt at its control was merely outside anyone’s circle of thought. You lived as part of it, not as its dominating power.