Mr. Milton set out in his great poem to justify the ways of God to men, as he says. He has not considered one question, however: perhaps God has forbidden men to know His ways, for if they did know th...
It is easy to imagine a world where not only can few people read, few need to or want to. Serious reading can become the preserve of a s mall group of specialists, just as shoe-making or farming is fo...
In a world of chemically induced sanity, a little lunacy confers immense advantages.
For the sake of objectivity, the programme analysed both histories - real and alternative - without being informed which was which. It concluded that the second, actual sequence of events was statisti...
Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world.
Aunt Gertie could not tell the difference between 1928 and now. Uncle Joseph was dead and alive. In other words, she grasped the essential non-existence of time. Generally speaking, our minds impose a...
And there will be no waste, I promise you, he went on, waving his finger in the air as he got into his stride.You see, the trouble with the professor is that, once he stops for lunch, he tends to lose...
And a more foolish notion can scarcely be imagined, it being obvious that the reader is only informed of what the writer wishes him to know, and is thus seduced into believing almost anything.
Some were simple idlers spending an inheritance pretending to be poets or painters; and a couple were medical students, who had a wildness of such severity that I would hesitate ever to place myself u...
The world needs only a few geniuses; civilization is maintained and extended by those lesser souls who corral the men of greatness, tie them down with explanations and footnotes and annotated editions...
The simple fact that something has not been done, is no proof that it cannot be.
The result was most peculiar, and it took a lot of work to get it laid out properly, but first tests were satisfactory. I called it Momentum and told anyone who saw it that it was a biting critique of...
Men reacted as they always did; some with an extreme of generosity, giving what little they could spare to strangers; others behaved with an equal and opposite extreme of harshness, demanding outrageo...
But, however splendid a job may seem when one does not have it, it rarely stands up to close acquaintanceship.
A company is a moral imbecile. It has no sense of right or wrong. Any restraints have to come from the outside, from laws and customs which forbid it from doing certain things of which we disapprove....
Men had turned their minds to the passion of faction, and learned to despise the old wisdom because they could not read it afresh.
The world was full of such madmen in those days. Imprisonment is not the way to deal with such people; half measures merely feed their pride. Leave ’em alone or hang ’em, in my opinion. Or better stil...
It was, for the time being, an empty threat, and he must have sensed it also, for he laughed easily and with contempt. You will do what your masters tell you to do, doctor. As do we all.
I should explain how my device worked. It operated by manipulating the ether, that non-existent substance which physicists had rationalised out of their theories on the usual grounds that if it could...
Politeness, I learned at her salon, is a demanding discipline; to convince others without recourse to the tricks of the demagogue or bully requires a high level of intelligence, especially when the au...