How can a man be so brilliant and so obtuse? — John Brunner

I simply can’t make myself believe that if they’d been handicapped by belief in capricious supernatural beings they’d have achieved what they did.

We’ve been amazingly lucky, which is another way of saying we’ve kept our eyes and minds open and responded when something turned up.

There’s an old saying: The genius sees what happens, but the plodder sees what he expects to happen.