“Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.”

“[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.”

“Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score; then to that twenty, add a hundred more; a thousand to that hundred: so kiss on, to make that thousand up a million. treble that million, and when that is done, let's kiss afresh, as when we first begun!”

“The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.”

“A week ago," Ishmael said, "when we were talking about laws, you said that there's only one kind of law about how people should live--the kind that can be changed by a vote. What do you think now? Can the laws that govern competition in the community be changed by a vote?""No. But they're not absolutes, like the laws of aerodynamics. They can be broken.""Can't the laws of aerodynamics be broken?""No. If your plane isn't built according to the law, it doesn't fly.""But if you push it off a cliff, it stays in the air, doesn't it?""For a while.""The same is true of a civilization that isn't built in accordance with the law of limited competition... Any species that, as a matter of policy, exempts itself from the law of limited competition will end by destroying the community...""Yes.""Then what have we discovered here?""We've discovered a piece of certain knowledge about how people ought to live. Must live in fact.""The law we've outlined here enables species to live--enables species to survive, including the human. It won't tell you whether mood-altering drugs should be legalized or not. It won't tell you whether premarital sex is good or bad. It won't tell you if capital punishment is right or wrong. It *will* tell you how you have to live if you want to avoid extinction, and that's the first and most fundamental knowledge anyone needs... You might say that this is one of the law's basic operations: Those who threaten the stability of the community by defying the law automatically eliminate themselves.”

“Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.”

“In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.”