Our civilization has decided ... that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained ...men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other... men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am the owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year,... Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain, Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to government founded on force. There is not, among the most r...eligious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And, shrilling from the solar course, Or from fruit of chemic force,... Procession of a soul in matter, Or the speeding change of water, Or out of the good of evil born, Came Uriel's voice of cherub scorn, And a blush tinged the upper sky, And the gods shook, they knew not why.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a s...keptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Senta: These boats, sir, what are they for? Hamar: They are solar boats for Pharaoh to use after his death. They're the means... by which Pharaoh will journey across the skies with the sun, with the god Horus. Each day they will sail from east to west, and each night Pharaoh will return to the east by the river which runs underneath the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human spirit is itself the most wonderful fairy tale that can possibly be. What a magnificent world lies enclosed within our b...osoms! No solar orbit hems it in, the inexhaustible wealth of the total visible creation is outweighed by its riches!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why is it that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it: we "make th...ings up." This is our trade. I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »