Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.
It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had n...
He is hated, because he teaches hate. We obey him because we must. He holds our minds in the hollow of his hand.
Had the memory worn thin? Had the debt he owed been paid? Had he discharged the last ounce of devotion? There are worlds out there, Andrew was saying, and life on some of them. Even some intelligence....
And with the quietness came an abiding sense of peace that seemed to seep into the very fiber of one’s being. It was no synthetic thing—not as if someone had invoked a peace and peace then was allowed...
And why should I, asked Joe, do something for someone who isn’t even born yet? Why should I look beyond the years of my own life? When I die, I die, and all the shouting and the glory, all the banners...
You humans are a lonely lot of folks. You never have known your fellow-man. You can’t know him because you haven’t the common touch of understanding that makes it possible to know him. You have friend...
Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology anymore. You can’...
Well, said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, it don’t matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson from...
We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minu...
They’re not our responsibility, gritted the mayor. Whatever happens to them is their own hard luck. We didn’t ask them here. We don’t want them here. They contribute nothing to the community. You’re g...
These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the s...
She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one...
Once there had been joy, but now there was only sadness, and it was not, he knew, alone the sadness of an empty house; it was the sadness of all else, the sadness of the Earth, the sadness of the fail...
Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.
Man was spread thin throughout the galaxy. A lone man here, a handful there. Slim blobs of bone and brain and muscle to hold a galaxy in check. Slight shoulders to hold up the cloak of human greatness...
Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life th...
Let’s get going, Towser urged.Where do you want to go?Anywhere, said Towser. Just start going and see where we end up. I have a feeling… well, a feeling-Yes, I know, said Fowler.For he had the feeling...
It seems to be a social axiom that as misery and privation increase for the many, the few rise ever higher in luxury and comfort, feeding on the misery.
If Man had taken a different path, might, he not, in time to come, have been as great as Dog?