“It may not have occurred to you kids that sex is more than a fifteen-minute trip to the backseat of a car. It’s science. And what is science?”“Boring.”

“The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.”

“You look like you got more of a bath than the car. I neverthought washing a car would be so hard, but after watching you for the last fifteen minutes, I’m convinced it should be an Olympic sport.”

“Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.”

“and men of science,' cries dixon, 'may be but the simple tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a hammer knows of a house.”

“Science fiction inspires scientists, but it doesn't exist to dictate what our future should look like. Great science fiction is fun to read and it makes you think, period. Claiming anything more than that is dicey. Grand visions of the future were more prevalent in the golden-age science fiction, but all fiction is a reflection of the current times. As science moves more quickly, the horizon of science fiction tends to recede closer to the present.”