“Do I chatter?” “Should I be honest or should I be tactful?” - Robert Silverberg

How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Good will alone is all that sustains it.

In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.

Why conjure up galactic spaceships when meteors were so common?