
Royal address at the opening of the fifth session of the 12th Parliament http://www.parlimen.gov.my/files/hindex/pdf/DR-12032012.pdf, 13/12/2011
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), Ch 19 - p.205 [Zellaby]
Royal address at the opening of the fifth session of the 12th Parliament http://www.parlimen.gov.my/files/hindex/pdf/DR-12032012.pdf, 13/12/2011
Quelle est cette île triste et noire?
C'est Cythère,
Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre.
"Un Voyage à Cythère" [A Voyage to Cythera], lines 5-8, trans. Roy Campbell http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Un_Voyage_%C3%A0_Cyth%C3%A8re
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)
Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: Take any work on astronomy of the last century, or the beginning of ours. You will no longer find in it, it goes without saying, our tiny planet placed in the center of the universe. But you will meet at every step the idea of a central luminary — the sun — which by its powerful attraction governs our planetary world. From this central body radiates a force guiding the course of the planets, and maintaining the harmony of the system. Issued from a central agglomeration, planets have, so to say, budded from it; they owe their birth to this agglomeration; they owe everything to the radiant star that represents it still: the rhythm of their movements, their orbits set at wisely regulated distances, the life that animates them and adorns their surfaces. And when any perturbation disturbs their course and makes them deviate from their orbits, the central body re-establishes order in the system; it assures and perpetuates its existence.
This conception, however, is also disappearing as the other one did. After having fixed all their attention on the sun and the large planets, astronomers are beginning to study now the infinitely small ones that people the universe. And they discover that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are peopled and crossed in all imaginable directions by little swarms of matter, invisible, infinitely small when taken separately, but all-powerful in their numbers.
“Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.”
Source: Written on the Body
“There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons.”
Afterwords on the Life of Kings, p. 434
The Boys Of Summer
“Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.”
Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 9