Space, man, have you no respect for science?
Past glories are poor feeding.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing...for an academic like me to find his abstract...
It is remarkable, Hardin, how the religion of science has grabbed hold.
I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it?
Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict---its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough,...
And Mallow laughed joyously. You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. Th...
I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.
We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. W...
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
I consider violence an uneconomical way of attaining an end. There are always better substitutes, though they may sometimes be a little less direct.
I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it....
He didn’t believe that, surely. Of course not! But he had to pretend he did, as otherwise he would have had no choice but to be insulted. And since there would be nothing he could do about that, being...
Childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child
It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.
Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?""From you, Pappa", I said."From me? I don't know any of this"."You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You...
You are never too old to learn more than you already know and to become able to do more than you already can.
Centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now.
And he wreaked havoc among the buttered toast as he said it.