I'm sorry I have to leave so suddenly', she apologized. 'I enjoyed our conversation, and I'll think seriously about your questions... You wanted to p… - Carl Sagan

What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?

Can we, who have made such a mess of this world, be trusted with others?

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

I … had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before,” wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, “but as far as it was possible for man to go.