Dmitri Bilenkin

““I’m not saying that you don’t exist. You exist falsely.”“But I’m flying!”“That’s the point. A man can’t fly on his own. That would be a miracle. People with little grounding in physics are apt to believe anything, but we know that there is no place for miracles in nature.””

“The professor was lost in thought. He was disturbed and worried, but proud that he was behaving like a true scientist: he wasn’t losing his head, or panicking, or believing in miracles.”

“This mountain could be a throne for God or Satan, but luckily, we are no longer children. We’ve climbed the highest peak in the solar system accessible to us, that’s all. Be happy, man!”

“What used to be an advantage had quickly turned into a liability, proving once more that in the mountains, as in life, nothing comes easily.”

“I’m sure that the fantastic descriptions of interstellar travel in the science fiction of the last century made many a heart skip a beat. I really don’t want my account to be a wet blanket, but the truth is the truth: there is nothing duller than space flight.”

“There is one basic fact that holds for all living things. Evil for any form of life is anything that hinders or threatens its existence; good is anything that promotes it. It’s that way everywhere, under every sun. It’s as obvious as two times two, because otherwise, if the opposite were true, life would be dooming itself to destruction. No civilization can change the criteria for good and evil without suffering for it.”

“There are no uninteresting fates, and each man takes away the universe when he dies.”

“Reason is our guide, but the eye is its most trusted counselor.”

““What is the aim of science?”“What?”“Man’s happiness. If science doesn’t make men happier, what good is it? Knowledge is power, a weapon, and if the scientist doesn’t care where it’s aimed, what makes him different from a mercenary soldier?””

“That was practically blasphemy, asking Gordon for an explanation, frail octogenarian Gordon. Demanding an explanation after Gordon had made it very clear that his word was the truth. But no, in this room that was the birthplace of the unified field theory, this was not sacrilege. Both men were subject to the same law, which was greater than both of them, and that law made it necessary for Gordon to offer substantiating proof. He could not violate it, or else science would turn into religion, and he into its high priest.”

“Life is full of situations cut short, unfinished observations, everything that doesn’t fit in the parameters of a story that would make sense to strangers. We keep them to ourselves and we carry them away with us.”

“We all love mysteries in books and hate them in life. I’m no exception. After all, the reason we love mysteries in books is that the secret is revealed on the last page.”

“Just try telling a teenager that he’s a conformist. Ha! It’s safer to tweak a tiger’s whiskers. Yet who’s most influenced by fads and fashions? Who is the easiest to turn into a raging mob? The teenager.”

“When the mind tries to guess the trajectory of a future moral act and concentrates too strenuously on contradictory concepts, the concepts themselves become unclear, because every concept is as deep-rooted and murky in its beginnings as the reality of life that gave rise to it. And the mind falters, determination slips away, and everything seems confused and wrong. That’s how thinking can sometimes destroy determination.”

“Here, now, in the deep Middle Ages, all this served as a safety valve. People experienced the illusion of being at one with themselves, with others, with that mystical being that was there in the church, watching over them and preserving them, chiding and blessing, enlightening and repressing, uplifting and reconciling. A completely different, anxiety-ridden emotional state, and an understandable, but repellent, spiritual world.”

““In traveling to the past, you can either appear in a predetermined point in space or in a predetermined point in time. In principle, it is impossible to do both simultaneously.” (Fundamental Temporalics, A.D. 2023)”