“Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

“If we stand by the eagle, fish will die; if we stand by the fish, eagle will die! This dilemma has been created by the random evolutionary process. There is no goodness, there is no justice and there is no intelligence in here. We are living in a primitive and flawed order.”

“One need only posit some threat to the public tranquility and any action can be justified. All the horrors of the reign of terror were based on concern for public tranquility.”

“Where would the would-be “purists” draw the line between native and alien elements? This whole planet was altered by the hand of man.A birder who scorned the alien Sky Larks might stand on San Juan and salute the native eagles . . . but some of those eagles had been released here; and they were living on an unnaturally high population of rabbits, from another continent, introduced here. The rabbits, in turn, were probably feeding on alien plants from other lands that were naturalized here — if the San Juan roadsides were anything like all the other roadsides in North America. And we birders of European descent were introduced here also, a few generations back. Even my Native American friends of the night before could claim to be “native” in only a relative sense; their ancestors had come across the Bering land bridge from Asia. None of us is native here.”

“This here is: JESUS LAND”

“Man who has lived through so many storms will either worship the tranquillity or will detest it!”