V.

“A hundred failures would not matter, when a single success could change the destiny of the world.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Possibly his experience with the bounty hunter Phil Resch had altered some minute synapsis in him, had closed one neurological switch and opened another. And this perhaps had started a chain reaction.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions . . . while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands . . . we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. “This consideration,” he concluded, “must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man.”
― Kirk W. Johnson, The Feather Thief

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey