A century ago we came to your world and saved you from self-destruction. I do not believe that anyone would… — Arthur C. Clarke

"All political problems," Karellen had once told Stormgren, "can be solved by the correct application of power"

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

Your mystics, though they were lost in their own delusions, had seen part of the truth. There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely. [...] During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora's box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.