We both know that actions taken from internal conviction are far better motivated than any external commands. - Charles Sheffield

When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get.

I’ll say only this: if we’re going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won’t have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology.

It is remarkable that observation of the faint agglomerations of stars known as galaxies leads us, very directly and cleanly, to the conclusion that we live in a Universe of finite and determinable age. A century ago, no one could have offered even an approximate age for the Universe. For an upper bound, most nonreligious scientists would probably have said “forever.” For a lower bound, all they had was the age of the Earth.