Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out.
The average bloke . . . hates and fears all freedom, not only for others but for himself, and stamps it out wherever possible.
Why don't they make more science fiction movies? The answer to any question starting, Why don't they- is almost always, Money.
It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own journey.
Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast.
Humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn - when they do, which isn't often - on their own, the hard way.
Take care of the cojones and the frijoles will take care of themselves. Try to have getaway money - but don't be fanatic about it.
Spacemen - men who work in space, pilots and jetmen and astrogators and such - are men who like a few million miles of elbow room.
Hit it! You have to hit it harder than that. Electrons are timid little things but notional; you have to let them know who’s boss.
Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.
Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root.
By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.
You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets fretful. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.
Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia - the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death...before they breed more hemophiliacs.
Ability is a wonderful thing, but its value is greatly enhanced by dependability. Ability implies repeatability and accountability.
The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.
I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
I've found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much . . . because it's the only thing that'll make it stop hurting.
Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.
Violence never settles anything should be debated by the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin, with the city fathers of Carthage as referees.
In reality, we haven't escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form.
Civilians are like beans; you buy 'em as needed for any job which merely requires skill and savvy. But you can't buy fighting spirit.
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.
Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.
Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.
All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not.
I was not offended, my love. An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted. And pride is too heavy baggage for my journey.
The lessons of history teach us - if the lessons of history teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Widows are far better than brides. They don't tell, they won't yell, they don't swell, they rarely smell, and they're grateful as hell.
To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.
Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.
Death isn't funny." "Then why are there so many jokes about death? Jill, with us — us humans — death is so sad that we must laugh at it.
But, if there ever was a time in history when "peace" meant that there was no fighting going on, I have been unable to find out about it.
Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of single-minded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money.
If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say : Let the damned thing go down the drain!
Have you ever known me to be rude to a lady?" "I have seen you be intentionally rude to a woman. I have never seen you be rude to a lady.
Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.
Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative.