"'Upon that machine',said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, 'I intend to explore time'." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine: An Invention", 1895)
"The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed to be the creation of a world of awakened, of sensitive, intelligent, and mutually understanding personalities, banded together for the common purpose of exploring the universe and developing the human spirit's manifold potentialities." (Olaf Stapledon, "Star Maker", 1937)
"The exploration of the unknown is always a fraud." (James Gunn, "Station in Space", 1958)
"The urge to explore, to discover, to ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star’, is a primary human impulse which needs and can receive no further justification than its own existence." (Arthur C. Clarke, "The Challenge of the Spaceship", 1959)
"Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed." (Stanislaw Lem, "Solaris", 1961)
"The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth." (James G Ballard, "Which Way to Inner Space?", 1962)
"Space... the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life, and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before." (] Gene Roddenberry, "Star Trek" (TV series), [opening narration] 1966)
"When they [radio astronomers] grew weary at their electronic listening posts, when their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with which they took the pulse of the all and noted the birth and death of stars, the probe with which, here on an insignificant planet of an undistinguished star on the edge of its galaxy, they explored the infinite." (James Gunn, "The Listeners", 1968)
"The exploration of alien worlds was just a monotonous and exhausting game." (Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky, "Prisoners of Power", 1969)
"He enters pain’s cold regions as an explorer, an objective visitor. It is a country of ice and glass, monochromatic plains and valleys filled with washblue shards of ice, crystal pyramids and pinnacles, squares, oblongs, and all manner of polyhedron - block upon block of painted blue pain." (Jack Dann, "Camps", 1979)
"We’re all trying to fulfill ourselves, understand ourselves, get in touch with ourselves, face the reality of ourselves, explore ourselves, expand ourselves. Ever since we dispensed with God, we’ve got nothing but our selves to explain this meaningless horror of life." (Paddy Chayefsky, "Altered States", [film] 1980)
"If we knew exactly what to expect throughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it." (Poul Anderson, "The Saturn Game, 1981)
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