Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

“You see, I’ve long since become unused to discussing humanity as a whole. Humanity as a whole is too stable a system, nothing upsets it.”

Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”

intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals.

intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”

Intelligence is a complex instinct which hasn’t yet fully matured. The idea is that instinctive activity is always natural and useful. A million years will pass, the instinct will mature, and we will cease making the mistakes which are probably an integral part of intelligence. And then, if anything in the universe changes, we will happily become extinct—again, precisely because we’ve lost the art of making mistakes, that is, trying various things not prescribed by a rigid code.”

Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.”

The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing

A man meets an alien. How does each figure out that the other is intelligent?”

‘You ask: what makes man great?’” he quoted. “‘Is it that he re-created nature? That he harnessed forces of almost-cosmic proportions? That in a brief time he has conquered the planet and opened a window onto the universe? No! It is that despite all this, he has survived, and intends to continue doing so.’”

A man needs money in order to never think about it.