The social problems were far tougher than technological ones, because — Henry Kuttner

"The fire that had come from beyond the stars was harnessed. Tamed — chained — by the flesh to which it had once, long ago, given life...."

"When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build."

"Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. "For," he thought, "a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtars hand saved me, one never knows." Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so."

"We need not go back through the cavern of the monsters," she said. "There is a way to reach the unseen road from here."

"In the face of real danger Elak forgot the gods and drew his rapier. Prayers, he had found, would not halt a daggers blow or a stranglers hands."

"All these things were slipping away from him, in a clear, cold wisdom that came from beyond the stars. He envisioned man as a bit of animate clay moving fro a little while upon a ball of mud and stone and water that drifted through the void, through the darkness that would finally engulf it."