“I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here.”

“There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.”

“My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence.[Sources and Acknowledgements: Chapter 19]”

“But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.”

“It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.”

“Could we go into your room?" she asked. "I knew it. I knew it," he said, spinning around and sliding quickly toward his door. "It's finally happend, just like in dreams. An intelligent, beautiful woman is going to declare her undying affection”

“Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself into thousands - no, by now millions - of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there's 99% overlap, the remaining one percent's enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders. "How to account for such irrational behavior? (...) religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil - but why was it so much more evil than necessary - and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?”