This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learned will guard us! - Brian Aldiss

A woman needs fatalism more than a man. A woman’s role in life is to listen, and when I listen I never hear anything but the howl of the wind. I prefer the sound of my own voice.

The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world — in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind — can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil.

As Flitch dryly remarked when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of ’em, but there ain’t any more of ’em growing up.”