“A few years ago London was surprised by a play called Rossum's Universal Robots. The production of such beings may well be possible within fifty years. They will not be made, but grown under glass. There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out in artificial surroundings the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child. Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil. The production of creatures, for instance, which have admirable physical development, with their mental endowment stunted in particular directions, is almost within the range of human power. A being might be produced capable of tending a machine, but without other ambitions.”

“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.”