A nuclear blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.
People who don't expect justice don't have to suffer disappointment.
The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.
Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.
Where the stars are scattered thinly,' quoted Barr, 'And the cold of space seeps in.
That was the trouble with the Outside. One teetered forever between unpleasant alternatives.
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
The rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had.
The intelligent man is never bored.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
The Scientist -- with capital letters and no smile.
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library.
Longer Version:
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.
I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world.
The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.
Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
Oh, for a pin that would puncture pretension!
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.
There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
Economics is on the side of humanity now.
If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success -- but only if you persist.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.
Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil--but there is no way around them.
From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
To insult someone we call him bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, human might be the greater insult.
Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Longer Version:
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know -- and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know -- even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction -- than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by -- Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
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