“So, one after another, either as pilots or passengers, will the members of the club ascend; and before the sheds are closed and the aerodrome deserted, each and all will have soared in flight, and tasted that thrill and exultation which comes of a rush in a plane through the cool of the evening air. But today, if we try to grasp such a notion as this, our state of mind is very like that of our grandfathers had some prophet dared tell them the day would dawn when, seated comfortably at dinner in a car on wheels, men would be drawn by an engine at 60 miles an hour: and yet the man or woman who has not, say twenty years hence, made a journey through the air, will be in exactly the same position as one who, at the present time, has never been by train.”

“Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a solution to the population crisis? One answer is that the world is rapidly running out of food. And famine, of course, could be one way to reach a death rate solution to the population problem. In fact, the battle to feed humanity is already lost, in the sense that we will not be able to prevent large famines in the next decade or so.”

“In twenty years, the USSR will be producing almost twice as much industrial output as is now produced in the entire non socialist world.”

“At present weapons are being changed every ten years, and even more frequently. In another fifteen years or so, people will use for shooting not rifles but some kind of lightning, some sort of a machine emitting a holocaustal electrical stream. Tell me: what can we invent in this line so as to surprise our neighbors? What if in fifteen years every great power will have secretly stored away one such surprise for any kind of eventuality? Alas, we are merely capable of imitating and purchasing ammunition from others, and—at best—of repairing it at home. To invent such machines we should have to have our own independent, and not purchased, science, not an imported but a free one—one that has taken root in our soil. As yet we do not possess such a science, nor do we even have a purchased one.”